grief

Melancholy

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Ma’s Donuts.

The picture sat in my inbox. A picture of an old recipe, brown with age, short on detail, ending with an abrupt: Roll out 1/4 inch think Fry.

Comical spelling error aside, there was only one short message sent with the image: It’s cold here!

Sent December 22, 2024. Not from my ma. Nor indeed from her ma. But from my dad’s ma, my Nana.

A donut recipe passed down through generations and one that we – my extended family and I – were all keen to make sure was passed down to us. Nothing was quite like the simple potato donuts, spiced with nutmeg, and fried to a golden brown.

And we all knew, though we didn’t say, the one who made these magical treats wouldn’t be around much longer.

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Delight 11: Hope in Grief

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I used to be top dog priority in my house before I went overseas.

I don’t mean in a “I was more important than everyone else in the household.” I was just literally my dogs’ top priority. Any time I went upstairs, there was a scramble of paws on the staircase behind me as my dogs raced me to the top to join me in taking a nap, working on homework, reading a book; really whatever it was, they just wanted to be a part of it. To sit at the foot of my bed and maybe get in a belly rub while they were at it.

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Breathe

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My heart is full.

As the year has drawn to a close, I’ve been distracted by school finishing oddly, manically finishing up work, grieving the people who are leaving, grieving opportunities lost, but seeing what my friends are going through back home is compounding that grief and I don’t want to be silent anymore because I am afraid of how I’ll be perceived.

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Retrospect

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It was one of those fall evenings where the light starts to fade earlier and everything feels much later than it should be: the night, the projects due, the dinner that no one’s gotten to yet. The symposium had gone well…what little I could understand of it. Sometimes I wondered how I even got into college and even now I felt like an infiltrator, sitting in the back of the classroom, pretending I could actually be a part of this world where people defended their papers to their peers.

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