There are things I believe now that I could not have explained ten years ago. Maybe I still cannot explain them. But I feel them. I have had too many moments of déjà vu, too many strange coincidences, too many things line up in ways that make me stop and wonder if reality is exactly what we think it is, or only the part we are capable of seeing.
I do not claim to understand any of it, and I do not need to. What I know is that when I slow down, when I stop filling every quiet space with noise, when I listen and really hear, when I pay attention and really feel, something changes. There is a kind of knowing there. Not loud. Not dramatic. Not something I can prove to anyone else. Just a deep, steady knowing.
That is where I am now. I have become more aware of my intuition, especially the kind of feminine intuition so many of us are taught to second-guess. That little voice. That feeling in your stomach. That moment when something inside you says yes, no, wait, go, pay attention.
I have also spent years learning what I am and, maybe more importantly, what I am not. I am not here to sacrifice myself for everyone else. I am not here to disappear inside other people’s needs. I am not here to make myself smaller so somebody else can feel bigger. That part of my life is over.
For almost four years, I drove nearly an hour each way to a job that was slowly draining the life out of me. Some days I drove in silence. Some days in shocked silence. Some days in tears.
What hurt the most was not the work itself. I knew I could do the work. I had the education. I had the experience. I had knowledge in areas that sometimes went beyond the people whose actual jobs those things were supposed to be. I was not trying to climb over anyone or take anyone’s place. I wanted a friendly workplace. I wanted people I could laugh with, solve problems with, learn from, and support.
Instead, I often felt like simply knowing what I knew, speaking up, or caring deeply somehow made me a threat. There were times I was given the silent treatment. Times I was ignored. Times I was made to feel like I should shrink myself, know less, say less, be less. Once, someone who had been there for years yelled at me in front of the boss, and nothing was said. Nothing.
And then there was the part that may have worn me down the most: having to work right beside one of the most two-faced people in the office. Knowing exactly how she behaved, knowing the things she said and did, and still smiling, making conversation, and playing along because that was what everyone seemed to do. I hated that. I hated pretending not to see what I could very clearly see.
But there were good people there too, and I never want to erase them from this story. I had work friends who made some very difficult days bearable, and a few of those friendships have become lifelong ones. For that, I will always be grateful.
And you know what? I still kept bringing the cheer because that is who I am. My heart already carried enough grief. I did not want to become another person who made the room heavier. I wanted to make things lighter. I wanted to laugh. I wanted people to feel good when I walked into the room.
And then there was the drive. Nearly two hours of my life every workday, alone in the car. The commute itself could be brutal. Snow. Ice. Tailgaters. People rage-passing on roads that were barely safe to begin with.
And then there were the migraines. Sometimes the aura would come on while I was driving, and I would have to pull over on the side of the road and sit there for thirty or forty minutes waiting for my vision to clear enough that I could safely keep going. That happened more than once. There is something deeply exhausting about realizing that even getting to and from work has become something you have to survive.
Somewhere during all those miles, something started changing. When you spend that much time alone, eventually the noise falls away. The anger. The resentment. The things people said to you. The things you wished you had said back. That commute gave me a lot of time to think about what I was willing to keep accepting, and what I was not.
At the same time, I was watching the organization itself change. We were an Area Agency on Aging in northern Vermont, serving people sixty and older and people with disabilities. The clients were supposed to be the reason we were there.
After new leadership came in, though, it increasingly felt to me as if the bottom line mattered more than the people we were supposed to serve. I still struggle with that. How does an organization built around helping older people and people with disabilities ever lose sight of the people?
Maybe others experienced that time differently. I can only say what it felt like from where I sat. For me, the unraveling came to a head on April 9th. A new policy was created that had not previously been on the table, and from where I stood, it made returning to work impossible. That was the day I left.
Then, one by one, other people I respected began leaving too. Between just six of us, somewhere around 75 years of agency experience walked out the door.
Seventy-five years.
That is a tremendous amount of history, knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory for one organization to lose. And all of that loss happened within roughly five months of my own departure.
I cannot speak for why every one of those people left. Their stories belong to them. But I can say that watching so much experience disappear from an agency whose work mattered so deeply was painful.
And somewhere underneath all of that workplace hurt, all of that anger, all of those long drives home, was something older.
Grief.
So much grief.
Some of my earliest lessons in grief came far too young. When I was fifteen, my boyfriend died by suicide. I was so shaken by it that my parents uprooted their own lives and moved us nearly 800 miles away, hoping distance from everything connected to that loss might give me a chance to begin again. That kind of love stays with me. They changed everything because they could see that I was drowning.
But grief was not finished teaching me.
I was the baby of four children. Debbie was ten years older than me. Sharon was eight years older. Mike was seven years older. And then there was me. For most of my childhood they were simply the older ones, already out ahead of me in the world.
Then life began changing the shape of our family.
Sharon died by suicide when I was twenty-two. She was twenty-nine. I held my first son on his first birthday while sitting in a church saying goodbye to my sister. My baby was turning one. My sister was gone. Life and death sitting beside each other in the same pew.
I listened to a priest speak from a belief system that suggested my sister might not make it to Heaven because of how she died. Even then, I remember thinking I was not particularly worried about that. Somewhere inside me, I believed there had to be something more compassionate than that. Something bigger than rules and punishment. Some place where pain was finally understood.
I could believe there was somewhere better for Sharon. I could believe there was somewhere better for me.
My practice of that punitive religion died that day too.
I was done with something that had always felt more like rules and guidelines than love and light. I could not make peace with a belief system that seemed to punish someone for the way they died after they had already suffered so much while they were alive.
Whatever came next for me spiritually, I knew it had to make more room for compassion. More room for mystery. More room for love.
Almost thirty years later, Mike fucking died. Cancer. My hero. The rock I always knew was just a phone call away. Gone. Once again I had to look my mother in the face and tell her that one of her children had died.
Debbie is still here. After all of her strokes, I am now her guardian. She lives in a nursing home. She has lost the ability to speak and walk.
Somewhere along the way, I went from being the baby of the family to carrying responsibilities I never imagined would belong to me. The little sister. The grieving sister. The guardian. The one who remembers. The one still here.
And then there are their children.
Because my siblings were so much older than me, I became an aunt while I was still practically a kid myself. My nieces are my rock now. Crystal came first, Debbie’s daughter. I was eleven. Ashley, Sharon’s daughter, came when I was thirteen. And then Alyssa, Mike’s daughter, when I was fifteen. (There are nephews, too. That's for a later post.)
I can still picture Mike with Alyssa as a baby. Here was this guy who smoked butts, wore leather jackets, played in rock bands and looked every bit the part, absolutely adoring this tiny baby girl. He was so proud of her. Watching him melt over her was one of the sweetest things.
All these years later, Alyssa has become one of the strongest connections I still have to my brother. There are pieces of him in her that I recognize instantly, and being close to her somehow keeps part of him close to me too. But she is not simply Mike’s daughter. She is an extraordinary woman in her own right. Strong, loving, resilient. The bond she and I have built means more to me than I can probably put into words.
Then there is Ashley. Ashley is a force to be reckoned with. I admire her so much and see so much of the strong parts that were shared traits from her mother. She is the epitome of a strong, independent woman who takes no shit and has built her life on her own terms. Considering what life handed her, there is something incredibly powerful about looking at the woman she became.
And Crystal and I do not talk nearly as often as we probably should. But the love is there. And when we do talk, we laugh. A lot. Some relationships do not need constant tending to remain real.
These women grew up while I was growing up too. I was their aunt, but in some ways we moved through life almost side by side. Now, all these years later, I can see the threads connecting us. Strength. Stubbornness. Humor. Survival. Tenderness hidden under armor.
The ability to keep going when life gets ugly. Not because we want to.
I am fifty-two now, and age feels different to me than it once did. Debbie was only a couple of years older than I am now when her strokes changed her life. Mike was only a few years beyond where I am now when cancer took him.
Fifty-four does not sound old anymore. Fifty-six does not sound far away. Those numbers feel close. Not frightening exactly. More like reminder bells.
Pay attention.
Stop postponing the life you want. Stop spending yourself on people and places that drain you. Notice the people you love while they are still here. Build something that belongs to you. Listen to your body. Listen to your intuition. Live now.
Because time does not ask permission before it changes everything.
Maybe that is part of why I feel so deeply connected to transformation. I have watched people I love change form in every possible way. Through death. Through illness. Through age. Through motherhood and fatherhood. Through becoming grandparents. Through simply surviving long enough to become someone they never expected to be.
Becoming a grandmother changed me too. There is something about looking into the face of your granddaughter and realizing that you are no longer only someone’s daughter or someone’s mother. You have become part of the bridge between generations.
You are standing in the middle now. Behind you are the people who made you. Beside you are the people walking through life with you. Ahead of you are the ones who will carry pieces of all of you forward.
What a strange and beautiful place to stand.
I spent years carrying grief almost protectively, as though grief itself were the vessel holding everyone I had lost. As if letting the grief go would somehow let them go too. As if healing meant forgetting.
I am beginning to understand that those are not the same thing. I do not have to hurt every day to prove that I loved them.
They are in the stories I tell. The things they taught me. The way I laugh. The things that still make me furious. The memories that arrive without warning. The pieces of them that became pieces of me.
Maybe grief is not where they live. Maybe love is.
And maybe that is part of what has drawn me toward witchcraft. Not fantasy. Not pretending I know the secrets of the universe. Connection. Intuition. Energy. The old idea that there is more happening around us than what can be measured at first glance.
I believe death may be transformation rather than an ending. I believe the people we love may not be gone so much as somewhere just beyond our reach. I do not know where. I do not know what comes next. I just feel that there is more.
And I pay attention to the strange little moments that arrive when I need them. A dream. A song. A name. A dime lying somewhere I know I did not leave one.
For me, it is often dimes. Random dimes.
My dad, who died in 2017 in my living room, leaves them for me and sometimes for other people too. At least, that is what I believe. They started showing up after he died, usually in strange places and at strange times, often when I seem to need them most.
One morning, I avoided what I truly believe could have been a fatal accident. By the time I finally made it into work, shaken and grateful to be there, there was a dime on the ground.
There have been many more moments like that, but those stories probably deserve a post of their own.
Maybe the dimes are coincidence. Maybe they are not. I am no longer interested in arguing with myself about it.
I notice them.
I let them mean something to me.
And I keep going.
Grief rarely arrives when invited. It comes through a song, a photograph, someone’s name, an unexpected message. Suddenly you stop. You take a deep breath in through your nose and, for just a second, you breathe them in.
Their voice. Their laugh. The way they took up space in the world. The tiny things you thought you would always have more time to notice.
Nobody really warns you about reaching an age where grief has walked beside you so many times that it simply becomes part of the landscape.
There have been too many losses. Overdoses. Cancer. Heart attacks. Lung problems. Sudden deaths that made no sense at all. People who seemed too strong, too vibrant, too larger-than-life for death to ever get its hands on them.
That was Mike. The guitarist. The comedian. The biker. The badass. But mostly, my brother. The same leather-jacketed rock-and-roll guy who once looked down at his baby girl and completely melted
.And now that baby girl is a grown woman I love fiercely.
Maybe that is part of the magic too. The people we lose do not simply vanish. Pieces of them keep moving through the world. Through their children. Through stories. Through music. Through laughter. Through memory.
Through us.
I am paying attention now. To my intuition. To my body. To my boundaries. To the people I love. To the work I am building. To the life that is still mine.
I started my own business, and be damned if I am going to let it fail. Shoulder surgery or not. Setbacks or not. Fear or not.
We are going to be okay.
Not because nothing bad will happen. Not because the universe owes me an easy road. But because I know who I am now. I know what I can survive. I know what I can build. I know what I will no longer give away.
I am not becoming someone else.
I think, finally, I am becoming more fully myself.
So when grief comes, I try not to push it away. I stop. I breathe. And for just a moment, I breathe them in.
Because sometimes the ache still rises into my throat, hot and tight, the kind that makes grief feel less like sadness and more like being strangled by love with nowhere left to go.
So I breathe them in.
And then I breathe again.
And maybe, somewhere just on the other side, they breathe with me.
Blessed be.
🌙🕯️🖤