I had a wonderfully girly day! A friend of my parent's gave me a table they didn't need and I found these wonderful craft organizers for my scrapbooking stuff and wah-lah! Craft room!! Hooray! I am now uber-organized and have a place where I can leave my projects out and I can close the door! I am sooooo excited!!! Hooray!
I got to experience my first blizzard at my new house! First we had an ice storm - which knocked out my power so I had to stay in a hotel - and then we got over 20" of snow. It was AWESOME!!!! I even got to use my snow shoes for the first time since moving to Ohio! Hooray!!
Usually the mailbox is higher than my shins...about 2 feet higher than my shins!!
Snow, wonderful snow, I love snow!!
Did I mention we got a lot of snow?? If I had thought this through I would have posed with a shovel and called my guy friends to tell them how wimpy they are! :o) Alas, I was too busy balancing the camera on the garbage can and then trying to run in snow shoes over to the huge pile of snow. Snow plow guy - $400 a year. Never having to shovel and getting to laugh at all your friends? - Priceless!
This was posted on a young widow board and I felt that it was a wonderfully eloquent way of expressing how those of us who have experienced deep grief feel as well as being something many of us wish our family and friends understood.
"Alan Wolfelt has given considerable thought to the role of a grief “companion.” According to Wolfelt, being a Companion is about:
• Honoring the spirit – it is not about focusing on the intellect
• Curiosity – it is not about expertise
• Learning from others – it is not about teaching them
• Walking alongside – it is not about leading
• Being still – it is not about frantic movement forward
• Discovering the gifts of sacred silence – it is not about filling every painful moment with words
• Listening with the heart – it is not about analyzing with the head
• Bearing witness to the struggles of others – it is not about directing those struggles
• Being present to another person’s pain – it is not about taking away the pain
• Respecting disorder and confusion – it is not about imposing order and logic
• Going to the wilderness of the soul with another human being – it is not about thinking you are responsible for finding the way out.
In looking at models surrounding grief and loss, Wolfelt believes we are confronted with three forces that might be framed as risks:
Risk #1: In our culture, the predominant bereavement care model for the bereaved is a medical model: assessing, diagnosing, and treating grief as an illness.
Risk #2: That bereavement caregivers may mirror our culture by supporting the quick-fix medical model approach to what is really a soul-based journey.
Risk #3: That bereavement caregivers see themselves as a separate class of “master” grief educators and counselors.
Wolfelt continues: I believe the limitations of our clinical, medical models are profound and far-reaching. Our modern understanding of grief all too often projects that for “successful” mourning to take pace, the person must disengage from the deceased and, by all means, “let go.” We even have all sorts of books full of techniques on how to help others “let go” or reach “closure.”
Our modern understanding of grief all too often conveys that the end result of bereavement is a series of completed tasks, extinguished pain, and the establishment of new relationships. In attempting to make a science of grief, we have compartmentalized complex emotions with neat clinical labels.
Wolfelt then goes on to state that a perfect state of reestablishment is impossible because:
A person’s life is changed forever after the death of someone loved.
The grief journey requires contemplation and turning inward. In other words, it includes sadness, anxiety, and loss of control. It requires going to the wilderness. Quietness and emptiness invite the heart to observe signs of sacredness, to regain purpose, to rediscover love, to renew life!
Searching for meaning, reasons to get one’s feet out of bed, and understanding the pain of loss are not the domain of the medical modes of bereavement care. Experience has taught me that it is the mysterious, spiritual dimension of grief that harbors the capacity to go on living until we, too, die.
Our current models desperately need a “supplement of the soul.” We need, as caregivers and as fellow travelers in the journey into grief, more life-giving, hope-filled models that incorporate not only the mind and body, but the soul and spirit."
The first annual murder mystery party is over with nothing left but incriminating photos, enough alcohol to keep the Marines happy and one helluva mess!!
Hayapitl and Toleleth - another cute father/daughter team!
Tokeleth and Bill Pistol (Mark) up to no good.
Tom (Alicia) and the Parrot (JP) - it's never too early to be a pirate!!!
Linda as Blaise - the Fury's chef. Who needs a hook when you have a spatula?!
Cutlass Annie and the Parrot (Anna and JP)
Deckhand Amy keeps us well fed and liquored up!
"Please take me on your boat...you're such a cute pirate..." 
Tom (Alicia), the Parrot, Elisabeth, Alice and Blaise
Hayapitl (Pete) and his fairly scary stickJason's stone went in back in May but this is the first time I have been able to make the 8 hour trip out here to see it. It's beautiful - it's a blue granite from Norway that we picked out for our kitchen. We didn't get the kitchen but he got the granite.
I got to see it in the dark, with a deep misting, snowing, fog surrounding me and deadening the night noises. And I cried. This is the only place on earth where I talk to Jason and not God. I only make it here about 4 times a year but I feel like I can reach him here. It is as if we both meet at this memorial place and acknowledge the ending of our story. In this one place it seems to be okay to forget all of the good and bad in this future I work for--to just let it go and immerse myself in missing him, mourning my loss. I weep for the life he'll never know and the one I must now make my own. In this place, time matters naught - 2 minutes, 2 years, tonight the ragged edges of the wounds on my heart throb in agony. The 'why him's so closely kept under lock and key are set free in the night and play havoc with my heart. Tomorrow I will lock them back up, lay roses on the snow and get back to living. Tonight. Tonight I need him. I need him to share this burden of grief with me, for what we lost can only be understood between us.
The catharsis is complete and leaves me exhausted and stripped. I go in from the gentle snow to celebrate Christmas with his family. We laugh and smile and joke - the blessed healing is wonderfully apparent in our little family group. And yet...I am left with a question...how long can we sorrow so deeply? Will ever a time come that a lonely Christmas graveside visit on a hauntingly beautiful night could simply evoke loss and sadness and not a swift return to the day he was lost? Will sorrow always be soul deep?
I do not know. So I sleep and wait for morning.
Anna and Caleb
Grandpa and Caleb
Gavin
Best Christmas present ev-a!
Eating like the big kids!
Caleb and Grandpa on the Wii
Come on, lemme play too!
Lookin' bad in Grandpa's hat!
Glen and Natalie reach for the sky!
Rachel and Natalie
Rachel
Natalie
Jean, Anna, Karen and Natalie
