the day my mother died essay

My mother's death isn't something I survived. It's something I'm still living through.

For years, I’d assumed I would be completely incapable of functioning after my mom died. I had no idea what my life would or even could look like after that. I couldn’t imagine it, just like I couldn’t imagine, when I was a kid, what it would be like to drive a car or go to college or even just be a grown up; it felt like I would just have to cease to exist when she did.

And yet, here I am, two and a half years after my mom’s death on May 15, 2018. I don’t know if I’m thriving, or even “surthriving,” a term that makes me think of a preternaturally peppy Molly Shannon character on “Saturday Night Live.” But at least I’m no longer sleeping with the lights on while the Mel and Sue years of “The Great British Baking Show” drone on at the edges of my consciousness … most of the time, anyway.

Opinion I thought the grief of losing my husband was over. Coronavirus brought it back.

I didn’t do anything in particular to survive her death except continue to stay alive. I certainly haven’t processed the pain, and I doubt I ever fully will; it’s all simmering just beneath my skin, ready to escape at the next Instagram story from The Dodo about interspecies friendship.

Immediately after her death, there were things that had to be done — writing an obituary, canceling her credit cards and hiring an estate attorney. And I did them; they filled some time. I had help — a lawyer, friends, family, the health aide who became a second daughter to her and a sister to me. Plus Mom had been very organized; she’d even prepared a list of all of her logins for me. Logistically, it was as easy as a death could be.

The most important thing I learned about grief is that it isn’t linear, and it isn’t logical.

But at the end of the day, I was her only child. And she was my only mom. And she was gone. Just gone.

So I let her answering machine fill up with messages, because I couldn’t cope. No one sat shivah for her in Texas; I didn’t even know where to begin to organize that. I had a panic attack in the housewares section of Target.

In the months after that, I declined a lot of social invitations; I whiffed deadlines; I stayed up all night playing video games and listening to true crime podcasts by myself. In short, whatever remaining concerns I had about meeting most societal norms went out the window.

Opinion My dad died from coronavirus. I'm not just grieving — I'm angry.

It wasn’t all terrible; there were small mercies that I’ll never forget. Even when I was at my worst, my loved ones did what they could to soothe the unbearable. My friends came and sat shivah with me in New York City when I arrived home, filling my apartment with carbohydrates and flowers. They flew to me when I needed them but couldn’t say. They took me into their homes when I showed up; or they took me hiking along the Pacific Ocean or to karaoke.

Still, my grief cruelly took away my ability to concentrate on books, movies or even any TV shows that required more than the bare minimum of intellectual processing. I had nothing left to invest emotionally or intellectually in anything I normally loved — or even anything I was once pleasantly distracted by. I struggled to pitch my editors. I flubbed an interview with a celebrity so disastrously I still think about it late at night.

Eventually, I allowed myself the luxury of going to therapy twice a week instead of just once.

If this all sounds awfully familiar to you, it’s because we’re all grieving in some way.

The most important thing I learned about grief is that it isn’t linear, and it isn’t logical. You have to be very careful with yourself and with who you’re around, and you have to make sure they’re extra tender to you, too. Even the most big-hearted people will do or say the wrong thing; I still do it myself. Most of their missteps are forgivable, but you’ll decide which ones aren’t, and that’s important, too.

Special bonds were formed in the last two years between me and the friends who’ve also experienced the loss of their mothers; it’s a very particular, complicated sort of loss that can feel extra messy and ugly. And, let’s face it, not many people can tolerate hearing about the disgusting indignities of aging and death unless they get paid by the hour — nor should they. There is also a kind of relief that you feel after a death like that, and the relief feels shameful, but even the shame feels like a relief, sort of like popping a pimple.

Opinion Nearly 2 million are grieving Covid dead. That's a pandemic, too.

I’m no longer scared when the phone rings (mostly). When a famous person dies, I no longer calculate how much older or younger they were than my mom, as if that somehow affected her odds of survival. Dead parents, it turns out, are great ice breakers on first dates and at cocktail parties. I’m thankfully off the hook for airport travel over the winter holidays. When certain dates roll around — like the anniversary of my parents’ respective deaths — I’m not sad so much as simply disassociated.

If this all sounds awfully familiar to you, it’s because we’re all grieving in some way. We’ve collectively experienced wave after wave of loss in the past nine months, and it scares me to think of how shattering it will be once the constant flow of news and tragedy relents just a little.

I didn’t do anything in particular to survive her death except continue to stay alive.

This sounds horrible but, without the death of my mom — and specifically the experience of grieving her death — I wouldn’t have emotionally or mentally survived the pandemic. While I’m still no expert at tolerating discomfort, I’m better at it than I used to be; there’s not much else to do when you’re laying sideways across your bed at 4 a.m. staring at your cat and feeling desperately, bitterly lonely, except to feel desperately, bitterly lonely.

Plus, now I don’t have to worry about her during the pandemic; she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and an increasingly knotty conflagration of disorders that would have made her an over-the-top risk for Covid-19, and she lived in Texas. She worried about me all the time anyway, even when there wasn’t an airborne virus ravaging us, and I’d have felt guilty for worrying her, and she’d want me to move back to Dallas, and, well, we’ve all seen “Grey Gardens,” right?

Opinion We want to hear what you THINK. Please submit a letter to the editor.

In the before-times, when I was on a subway stopped between stations, I’d try to sense the millisecond it began to lurch back into motion, until I could no longer tell the difference between standing still and moving. Grief is like that, but with fury and fear and sadness and a terrifying blankness that nothing can soothe. You can’t tell when the subway will start moving again; you can’t magic it into motion. You can only wait and see what happens, and make sure you’re holding on when it starts moving again.

You won’t believe the kinds of things you can survive. I didn’t. I still don’t.

More from our project on surviving 2020 and what comes next:

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Jenni Miller is a freelance writer who covers movies, TV, sex, love, death, video games and assorted weirdness for a variety of publications online and in print.

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“When my mother died…” by Thich Nhat Hanh

by admin | Feb 17, 2016 | Blog | 0 comments

“The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. I t was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet… wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Thich Nhat Hanh > Quotes > Quotable Quote

“The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil. From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.”

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The Day My Mother Died

The importance of last words..

Posted August 13, 2019

My mother died on June 18, 2019. She was 96. It was a mere 23 days from her diagnosis of colon cancer to when I got a call early on a Tuesday morning. The physician’s assistant said she had died peacefully, but she had been alone. My first thought as I sat on the edge of my bed was, “I should have been there.” I was there when my father died in 1998. Why not my mother, as well.

During those 23 days, I had made the trip back and forth to Pennsylvania, where my mother was hospitalized, several times. She may have been 96, but she had lost none of her cognitive abilities, so we talked, as we often did, about everything, including politics , church, and what was coming. She refused treatment. In her own words, she was “ready to go,” and had been for several years. Sometimes she even grew angry at God for dawdling, but she never abandoned her faith.

Twice she suddenly asked me to hold her hand because she was afraid. Soon after she would be fine. She made additions to her memorial service plans, and insisted that it not be sad; she didn’t want anyone to think she wasn’t happy to die. (I announced this at the beginning of my eulogy.) We talked about when to hold the service, and she said with a glint in her eye, “It doesn’t matter because I won’t be there.” Ever my mother’s son, I replied, “That’s too bad because I already have you penciled in to do a reading.”

She speculated about the afterlife. She said she didn’t “know if it was allowed,” but if it was, she’d come back to “tap me on the shoulder.” I smiled and said, “That would be great.” I thanked her for being my mother and told her I loved her.

Her prognosis changed from "days" to "weeks," so I felt comfortable going home for the weekend. I planned on coming back Wednesday of the following week, what turned out to be the day after she died. While home, I talked multiple times with my brother who lived in PA and with staff at the hospital. When the phone rang at such an odd time that Tuesday morning I knew exactly what it was about.

I did not feel a tap on my shoulder, at least not one that I noticed. About a week later, though, I couldn’t sleep and came downstairs to sit on our enclosed porch. Eventually, I lay on the swing and fell asleep. Sometime during the night, I sat up to turn over. When I did, I heard a female voice say, “It was time.” The voice was so loud that I was frightened and called out, “Who is it?” Then it was quiet again and I lay back, wondering if it had been a dream.

The next morning, I sat on the porch thinking about what had happened during the night. Was it possible that the words I heard were meant as a response to what I thought when I learned my mother had died---“I should have been there”? That somehow I was being told she had wanted to die alone. That she didn’t want either of her sons to be there, to suffer that. This was a comforting, if fanciful, notion.

In the coming days, though, I learned from my brother that my mother had suggested he “take a day off” from visiting her that Tuesday. And my cousin told me that my mother had always said she wanted to die in her sleep by herself.

Who knows about these things? Who understands the final acts of the dying? Is there anything more painful than for a parent to leave their child for any reason, particularly by dying? Perhaps I was awakened by a mother trying to comfort a grieving son.

In her final months, my mother often told me she missed my father. I asked her what she missed most about her husband. She thought for a moment and said, “Dancing with him.” And in her final days, she told me she wished he would be there to help her “cross over.”

I have reason to believe that when she died, the music she heard wasn’t a choir of angels, but rather it was Glenn Miller, and the arms that were outstretched for her were my father’s, and that she nestled into his arms and they did what they loved, which was to dance.

I am reminded that there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.”

David B. Seaburn is a novelist. His latest novel is Gavin Goode. Seaburn is also a retired marriage and family therapist and minister.

David B. Seaburn, Ph.D. , L.M.F.T. , is a writer, marriage and family therapist, psychologist, and minister who has written four novels and two professional books.

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“Ode to a Day in the Country” and “The Day My Mother Died” Comparison

Poetry is an effective form of communication. Literature students read and compare poems from different eras in order to understand their similarities and differences. This contributes to the knowledge of an array of issues that exist in societies such as culture, religion, and media. This paper outlines comparative literature of the neighborhoods of Gary Soto and Marge Piercy (which was also my neighborhood).

Similarities of the Neighborhoods

Both of us grew up in areas with high populations. I lived in Detroit, the neighborhood of Piercy. Life was lovely with plenty of food from farms, which were in proximity to the urban areas. Similarly, Soto grew up in a Central Valley, in California. He hailed from Fresno where his family depended on agriculture for economic gains.

There were two distinct social classes in the neighborhoods; the poor and the rich. They had different lifestyles; the poor lived miserable lives with meager finances whereas the rich lived affluent lifestyles with adequate finances. Both of us belonged to the poor social class. Soto and his family moved out of the agricultural Fresno area into the industrial area to look for jobs following his father’s death. Similarly, following the death of my mother, we had to move out of an asbestos house, to look for manual jobs in the industrial area of Detroit.

We grew up in mixed-race neighborhoods. Soto grew up in a neighborhood of Mexican Americans, and I grew up among African Americans and Jews. Life was tough in the neighborhood as seen in Soto’s poem where he says “so man tugs on a sock, and this is sheep, and child slips on a hat.” This indicates that they depended on animal skin for clothing as opposed to rich people who could buy manufactured goods (Gary, 1992). Piercy says, “…drew the curtains and examined the face of the day” signifying that life had to change after the mother’s death (Piercy, 2003). Life in the neighborhoods was hard for anyone without parents.

Differences about the Neighborhoods

I grew up around the blacks or African Americans, whereas Soto grew around Mexican Americans. The mixed races determined the activities and nature of the two neighborhoods. Racism was the order of the day with the superior races getting opportunities for employment in my neighborhood. My neighborhood got frequent attacks from troops who were against Semitism, whereas that of Soto was peaceful.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit city. On the contrary, Soto grew up in a rural area in California. I had some privileges such as an alarm clock. Piercy talks about alarm ringing into her ear following her mother’s death (literary) and an alarm clock was a preserve for the middle and high class in my community (Piercy, 2003). On the contrary, Soto lived in rural areas as seen in his concern for sheep, in his poem.

Soto’s neighborhood did not value education. In the poem, Soto mainly talks about animals and poverty. In some Odes, he says “Our shelves were not lined with books, they were lined with Menudo.” His family did not encourage him to work hard in school. Therefore, Soto maintained the status quo of his society and remained semiliterate for a long time. On the contrary, my neighborhood encouraged me to get an education since there were many schools in the city. Piercy says, “I seldom have premonitions of death.” (Piercy, 2003). This was the same situation as me. My society had taught me to be a strong person and use of reason, not spirituality in making sound judgments. The neighborhood had nurtured me in to a person who loved reading, and I developed a reading culture during my middle childhood.

In essence, poets come from different neighborhoods. There are those who are poor, rich, dynamic, creative and imaginative. It is expedient to understand the neighborhood in which a poet grew in order to understand the subject matter and context of their poems. This knowledge also helps the reader to elaborate on the meaning of a poem.

Gary, S. (1992). “Ode to a Day in the Country.” In Neighborhood Odes. New York: Harcourt.

Piercy, M. (2003). “The Day My Mother Died.” In Colors Passing Through Us . New York: Knopf Publishers.

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StudyCorgi. (2020, May 18). “Ode to a Day in the Country” and “The Day My Mother Died” Comparison. https://studycorgi.com/ode-to-a-day-in-the-country-and-the-day-my-mother-died-comparison/

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StudyCorgi . "“Ode to a Day in the Country” and “The Day My Mother Died” Comparison." May 18, 2020. https://studycorgi.com/ode-to-a-day-in-the-country-and-the-day-my-mother-died-comparison/.

StudyCorgi . 2020. "“Ode to a Day in the Country” and “The Day My Mother Died” Comparison." May 18, 2020. https://studycorgi.com/ode-to-a-day-in-the-country-and-the-day-my-mother-died-comparison/.

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Palestinian Baby Delivered After Mother Killed in Israeli Strike

The baby was born 10 weeks premature and weighed three pounds, a doctor said. Her father and sister also died.

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By Liam Stack

reporting from Jerusalem

• April 22, 2024

Doctors in Gaza delivered a baby on Saturday from a Palestinian woman who had been killed alongside her husband and daughter in an Israeli strike in the city of Rafah, where more than one million people have fled during Israel’s war in Gaza.

The birth of the child was captured on video by a journalist from the Reuters news agency, who filmed doctors providing artificial respiration to her after she emerged pale, limp and seemingly lifeless from her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani.

“Here is the biggest tragedy: Even if this child survives she was born an orphan,” Dr. Mohammed Salama, the head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Al-Emirati Hospital in Rafah, told Reuters.

The baby was born 10 weeks premature and weighed three pounds, Dr. Salama told Reuters. Her mother was already dead when she was born, he said. Instead of a name, doctors wrote “the baby of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani” on a piece of tape across her chest.

Rami al-Sheikh, the baby’s uncle, told a video journalist from Reuters that her older sister, Malak, had wanted to name her Rouh, the Arabic word for soul. Malak also died in the strike.

He said the family was “ordinary civilians.”

“My brother is a barber and used to work with me in the shop,” Mr. al-Sheikh said about the baby’s father. “They were happy people, and the little girl Malak was happy that her sister was coming into the world.”

The baby was in a perilous state after her birth, but now, aside from some respiratory problems, her condition is stable, Dr. Salama said. She will spend three to four weeks in the hospital, and then doctors will figure out whom to send the baby home with.

“Hopefully after her respiratory distress improves, she will need to be breastfed,” Dr. Salama said. “She has been denied everything — denied her mother, denied her milk. Some substitutions can be made, but nothing will ever replace her mother.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the day a baby was born to a mother who had been killed in an Israeli strike in Rafah, Gaza. The baby was born on Saturday, not on Sunday. The error was repeated in a video caption.

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Liam Stack is a Times reporter covering the Israel-Hamas war from Jerusalem. More about Liam Stack

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The United Nations says famine is likely to set in by May in Gaza. For those living under Israel’s attacks and a crippling blockade, every day is a race against time. Here’s how two Palestinian families  try to keep their children alive.

Israel has failed to achieve its two primary goals of the war, while the suffering of Palestinians  erodes support even among its allies. Here’s a look inside the stark reality  of Israel’s fight in Gaza.

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A Surprising Rift: The Israel-Hamas war, which has roiled cultural and political institutions far beyond the Middle East, is causing divisions in a prominent Japanese American group .

Mobilizing the American Left: As the death toll in Gaza climbed, the pro-Palestinian movement grew into a powerful, if disjointed, political force in the United States . Democrats are feeling the pressure.

Want to engage your dreams? Start with mugwort and a full bladder

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This story is part of Image’s April issue, “ Reverie ” — an invitation to lean into the spaces of dreams and fantasy. Enjoy the journey.

The first Visitation occurs in a dream on the wings of an aircraft transporting me and my mother to San Antonio, because my sister has died. My sister materializes through golden-hued cumulus clouds, beckons with her hand for me to come to her, and so I do. In my palms, she drops an orb of pure golden light before retreating back into cloud.

Visitations, in addition to meaning a gathering of friends and family for the recently deceased, can also be defined as a visit from the deceased. In my Dreaming Life, my sister returns, randomly yet always intensely, to travel here to me within my perceptible life, to tell me things. It is not always so clear what it is that she has traveled so far to tell me.

Instead of holding a visitation, my family chooses to offer two funeral services. A whole grocery store cannot be shut down, so we opt to hold the service over two nights, to allow my deceased sister’s coworkers to come by between their shifts.

Every person — customers, old school friends, neighbors, children of exes — holds on to me to say how my sister had been their angel and inspiration and life’s guiding light. My sister, who died at age 48 of breast cancer, had become an angel through the workings of Death, but she had — as reaffirmed again and again through the tears and sorrows of the receiving line — also been an angel in her Waking Life.

Visitations occur because those who mourn occupy an unreal space; loss transcends reality or else collapses that once-stable sense of self, space and time.

Visitations occur because those who mourn occupy an unreal space; loss transcends reality or else collapses that once-stable sense of self, space and time. As any of us who have lost know, such deep losses fracture the self. Loss upends our notions of space: The space is now dominated by an insurmountable absence. This absence distorts time or those edges of days or weeks or months that were once so clearly demarcated.

In mourning and grief, it is this very haze of the fracturing of self, space and time that can find, in the practice of Visitation, some temporary bearings within a world upended. To see the familiar faces, to hear the old story, to think about the old song — such remembrances tether us, however frayed and fragile the gossamer of grief, to a world transformed. The world is now distorted: it is a world where someone’s gone missing.

This teacher will guide you into talking with your dreams. A warning: They will talk back

Watching your dream play out before your eyes in waking life is like inhabiting an alternate reality: hair-raising, confronting, wrecking.

April 3, 2024

In the world now absent my sister, I cling to each and every Visitation from her as she comes in dreams. I have always had a peculiar interest in the Dreaming Life, and after my sister died, I found that if I wanted to continue some form of communication with her, I would have to be the astronomer and detailed data collector in the observatory of sleep. Only I could keep the lookout; only I could transcribe the fates.

So I began to entangle my Waking Life within the Dreaming Life.

Everyone suddenly, it seems, wants to lucid dream. I say: First dream, but dream actively. Here are some practices I take to ensure an engagement in my Dream Life:

• Keep a notebook bedside. Reach for this notebook first thing upon waking, whatever the hour. Even if you can’t recall any dreams, this practice, which can be difficult to establish, will develop into a habit. If you cannot recall the dream fully formed, then record dreamlets — the fragments of dreams.
• Drink water. The body, of course, is optimal when hydrated, but falling asleep with a full bladder will help you to wake in the middle of the night with a glimmer of a dream. Be sure to discipline yourself to write your dreamlets down before you go to the bathroom and forget. Keep a notebook by the toilet to help you remember.
• Rest your mind before sleep. Tell yourself that you are going to dream and that you will remember your dreams and that you will write them down. It’s OK if you’re stressing or thinking troubled thoughts before bed. Think what you will, but always firmly believe that you will dream. I recommend reading before bed, as it is an activity that stimulates the mind, imagination, openness to surprise, close attention and interpretation: These are the stuffs of reading your own dreams.
• Sleep in. We have more opportunities to dream when we are able to sleep in. Give yourself the gift of this at least once a week.
• Try mugwort in your bedtime tea. After a few weeks of active dreaming, try mugwort tea on the nights when you can sleep and dream more freely. Mugwort is an herb that is easily foraged and induces more vivid dreams. A teaspoon will suffice.
• Ask yourself what is troubling you. Can you reframe this worry through what your dreams have been showing you?

By paying attention to your dreams and collecting your dreamlets, you will begin to see a way out. You can face the situation, in however a veiled or coded way, in your dreams. You can practice your way out or through or in.

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In a dream, I was once an unexpected visitor. I came upon a corridor, white and filled with light, through which my sister glided. I ran after her, but I was stopped by an attendant, in white, who told me that I couldn’t go through the doors but that my sister was there, on the other side, making it beautiful for me.

And so who’s to say that in this life, we are not merely visiting? If the dreams of unborn babes are the dreams of practicing at living, for what then is this Waking Life preparing us?

In one dream, my sister wants to go to Brazil. We’re on a highway in San Antonio. We’re going fast around all the cloverleafs and overpasses. We take curves dangerously fast. I tell her that I’m happy to go with her, but does she know the way? Yes, she replies. She says she goes all the time. She knows the way. In the dream, we never get there, but we’re so happy to be free, to just do it, to go wherever, whenever with a sister.

In dreaming, it’s not so easy as paying attention to merely one dream. One dream taken out of your map of dreaming is merely a piece, a clue, a hint toward a totality. One dream is one spot of paint viewed up close on an otherwise vast masterpiece — you won’t know what it is you’re seeing until you’ve amassed enough, connected the dots, done the good work of a detective.

I am a writer who gains through fragments, rarely composing a full essay in one go. I prefer instead to accumulate the bits and pieces, stitch them up, allow happenstance and discovery to arrange the pieces, determine the binding. I like to begin in chaos and have that chaos propel its own focus or refractured brilliance.

My Dreaming Life is no different: I see dreams as fragments of a greater masterpiece. So I jot down my dreams.

My Dreaming Life is no different: I see dreams as fragments of a greater masterpiece. So I jot down my dreams. These dreamlets, these glimmers of a seemingly real and lived experience, eventually pull toward their narratives, eventually show me my struggles and push me on toward a way out in such a way that I can solve the problem in the Dream World while simultaneously tackling a very real-world problem. The two are not inseparable.

I collect the glimmers and connect the dots. My sleuth side sees dreams as not a mere escape from the logic or hardships or realities of the day but rather a world in the making. The dreams enable me to prepare for the next life as it navigates me, night after night, from one realm to the next and back again.

My sister and I entered the scary exhibit at a wax museum on one of the outings we last took together. She was afraid of what might appear. I held her hand and led the way. I knew it would be one of the last times I would hold her hand. My sister, who had always gone first in my fear of dark hallways, was now being led by my hand.

Except, in Waking Life, that is in reality, my sister is the one who goes first into the fear of the dark, into the dream of Death, of which I have always held a tight fear.

If I am to see what there is to see in the ongoing series of Visitation dreams from my deceased sister, then I would have to conclude that she is truly there, on the other side, making it beautiful for me.

Jenny Boully is a Guggenheim Fellow whose books, including “Betwixt-and-Between,” employ dreams alongside real-life entanglements. She has two books forthcoming from Graywolf Press. In addition to teaching at Bennington College, she offers private dream writing guidance.

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Bethenny Frankel announces mom Bernadette Birk has died from lung cancer in touching tribute

Bethenny Frankel is mourning the death of her mother, Bernadette Birk, who died from lung cancer.

Birk died on April 19, 2024 at age 73 in Sunrise, Florida, according to Neptune Society.

Frankel shared news of her mother’s death on Instagram on Saturday, April 20. The former “Real Housewives of New York City” star posted a carousel of photos alongside the touching tribute, including photos of her and her mother over the decades, ending with a snap of Birk posing with Frankel’s daughter, Bryn Hoppy.

In the caption, Frankel wrote about her complicated relationship with her mother, including both the good and the bad from their years together as mother and daughter.

“She was complex, in pain, isolated and had demons,” Frankel wrote of her mother. “She was the most stunning woman you have ever seen, who left her abusive home as quickly as I ran from mine.”

While Frankel described her mother as “brilliant, funny, cultured and wise,” she also noted that she had her struggles too, including alcohol abuse, an eating disorder, smoking and “self destruction.”

“Despite not being equipped to be a mother, she loved me and I have beautiful memories of her,” Frankel added. “She taught me food, wit, culture and strength. She loved to dance.”

Frankel didn’t “sugarcoat” her tribute, noting that she became “an adult” before she was the age of her 13-year-old daughter, adding that she experienced “things no young child should endure.”

“This made me strong, tough, a survivor who is able to handle anything,” she wrote. “The universe gave me the most beautiful daughter and my childhood gave me inspiration to break the chain.”

Frankel said that she ultimately reconnected with her mother for the sake of Bryn, noting that her mom “adored” her daughter and they had a shared love of art.

“She was selfish in life, yet selfless in death,” Frankel wrote. “She left what little she had to my daughter, wished to be cremated, and wanted no one to be notified besides me.”

While Frankel shared some of the tougher moments with her mom, she also said that she remembered her “during periods of happiness loving me and long for those memories of affection.”

“I mourn her loss, her life, her loneliness and my childhood,” Frankel wrote. “I mourn her inability to experience motherhood, the most beautiful gift of a lifetime.”

Frankel shared a sendoff to her mom, noting, “You did the best you could and you are free and at peace.”

“I miss my mommy as a little girl and I am grateful for my daughter consistently pushing to meet her and myself for re opening old wounds for their relationship,” she wrote in part. “Life is about loss and loving. I have had shame in never really having family, yet my very small group of friends, my beautiful Bryn, and you are my family.”

To end her caption, Frankel encouraged her followers to “call, connect with, or hug someone you have a complicated relationship with.”

Frankel’s comment section was flooded with condolences from friends, fans, and fellow “Real Housewives” cast members and alums.

Kyle Richards commented on the post, writing, “I’m sorry Bethenny. Thinking of you and Bryn.”

“So sorry for your loss , so sorry for the pain your mother had within her and had it affected your relationship with her,” Ramona Singer wrote in the comments.

Vicki Gunvalson added, “I’m sorry for your loss. This was beautifully written. Peace be with you.”

“I felt this,” Sai De Silva, who opened up about her complicated relationship with her late mother during Season 14 of “RHONY.” “What a beautiful message Bethenny, sending so much love and light.”

Many fans also shared their own similar experiences in the comments, with one Instagram user writing, “You speak for so many of us . Peace.”

“Such beautiful words and so extremely similar to my mom,” another fan wrote. “Sorry for such a loss.”

One fan added, “I completely get this. Every word. I’m sorry.”

Francesca Gariano is a New York City-based freelance journalist reporting on culture, entertainment, beauty, lifestyle and wellness. She is a freelance contributor to TODAY.com, where she covers pop culture and breaking news.

Michael Cuscuna, jazz producer who sought forgotten gems, dies at 75

Mr. cuscuna searched the vaults of the storied blue note label and co-founded a record company to expand jazz history.

Michael Cuscuna, a jazz historian and producer who combed the archives of storied Blue Note Records for lost tracks of greats such as Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, and co-founded a label that released Grammy-winning compilations from jazz’s golden age, died April 21 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 75.

He had been under treatment for throat cancer and other medical problems, said his wife, Lisa Cuscuna.

Since the 1970s, Mr. Cuscuna helped reissue recordings or find never-released music for hundreds of albums at Blue Note and Mosaic Records, a label he created in 1982 with a former Blue Note marketing executive, Charlie Lourie . Mr. Cuscuna’s work was often cited for significantly deepening the knowledge of jazz and how the genre influenced American culture.

In a 2005 interview with JazzTimes magazine, Mr. Cuscuna described his quest as filling in the blanks in jazz history. “My main motivation is really not reissues, it’s focusing on unissued material,” Mr. Cuscuna said . “Even if it deserves to come out, as long as it’s unissued, it really doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Cuscuna explored the jazz world much the same way a detective works a cold case. The legwork became an obsession, first as a jazz radio DJ and then a music journalist and producer. He followed rumors of forgotten studio sessions, read past interviews and liner notes, hunted through old contracts and interviewed musicians for tips about forgotten recordings. He filled notebooks of every detail, no matter how obscure or hazy.

“I tried constantly to get into the vaults,” Mr. Cuscuna wrote in a biographical note on the Mosaic website. In 1974, he arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with Lourie, a musician and former CBS Records executive who had recently joined Blue Note as head of marketing. Mr. Cuscuna showed Lourie his notebooks. Within days, a contract was drafted for Mr. Cuscuna to see what he could do with the Blue Note collection.

“I was at last,” he wrote, “in the Blue Note vaults.”

For the next six years, Mr. Cuscuna and Lourie reissued some of Blue Note’s classic recordings such as Monk’s jazz combo, the horns of Miles Davis and piano of Kenny Drew . Mr. Cuscuna also made another breakthrough find: the notebooks of Blue Note co-founder Alfred Lion , which was full of details on studio sessions and tracks, including some that were never released.

“The experience was staggering,” Mr. Cuscuna wrote. “There were far more unissued sessions than I had even imagined. … So began a long odyssey to unravel this mess and shape it into a body of work that could be released.”

In 1981, the entire Blue Note operation was effectively mothballed by the label’s owner, EMI. Mr. Cuscuna and Lourie, now jobless, negotiated continued access to the Blue Note archives. With that agreement in hand, they launched Mosaic, specializing in limited-edition jazz box sets, along with companion essays and photographs by Francis Wolff , who specialized in the jazz scene and was deeply involved with Blue Note.

Mosaic’s first release was “The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk” (1983), a rerelease that included about 30 minutes of music that had not been made public. “Most of it alternate takes,” Mr. Cuscuna told NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” in 2009, “that I had to get out.”

Mosaic began building its catalogue by reissuing albums from Blue Note and other labels. “The Complete Nat ‘King’ Cole Capitol Trio Recordings” (1993) won a Grammy Award for best historical compilation. Mr. Cuscuna also received Grammys in 1999 and 2002, respectively, for box sets of music from Davis and Billie Holiday.

“If I put out music that is really unworthy or would embarrass the artist or make an artist unhappy, then I think that’s the worst sin I could commit,” Mr. Cuscuna told the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2011.

Blue Note was revived in 1984 under its new chief, Bruce Lundvall. He offered Mr. Cuscuna a role at Blue Note leading the reissue of hundreds of albums over the next two decades as the label experienced a revival in the jazz world. The projects included Mr. Cuscuna working with Blue Note studio engineer Rudy Van Gelder to remaster some of his best-known recordings with Art Blakey, Tina Brooks and others.

In 2005, Mr. Cuscuna oversaw Blue Note’s release of a rare moment: Monk’s quartet and John Coltrane onstage together. The album , “Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane: 1957 Concert,” came after a jazz researcher, Larry Appelbaum, uncovered a recording of the Carnegie Hall concert at the Library of Congress.

Mr. Cuscuna called the find “unbelievable” because Coltrane and Monk played together for just six months. “For decades people have speculated on how the group sounded after they developed,” Mr. Cuscuna told Billboard. “But all you had until now was an oral history.”

Michael Arthur Cuscuna was born Sept. 20, 1948, in Stamford, Conn. His father was on the local housing commission, and his mother was a homemaker. As a teenager, he started to spent time at jazz clubs in New York.

He received a drum kit as a gift but soon realized he would never become a top drummer. “And I switched to alto saxophone and flute, and eventually tenor sax and flute,” he said in a 2019 interview, “and even then I wasn’t a good musician.”

While at the University of Pennsylvania, he landed a spot on the campus radio station, WXPN. After he graduated in 1970 with an English degree, he was hired as a disc jockey for a jazz show on WMMR in Philadelphia and then went to New York’s WABC-FM (now WPLJ) as part of a morning show.

He reviewed bands and albums as a freelancer for DownBeat magazine, Rolling Stone and others. In the recording industry, he became a freelance producer for labels including Atlantic, Motown and Arista, working on albums for musicians such as Dave Brubeck and Bonnie Raitt.

While sorting through the Blue Note archives, Mr. Cuscuna wondered about the album covers. Where were the images not used? He learned there were at least 20,000 unpublished shots by Wolff stashed away. Mr. Cuscuna took on another job as Blue Note’s photo archivist.

“It’s not hyperbolic to say that there would be no legacy for us to caretake without the exhaustive work he did to identify, catalogue and circulate both our master tapes and the Francis Wolff photo archive,” said a Blue Note statement following Mr. Cuscuna’s death.

Survivors include his wife of 38 years, the former Lisa Podgur; two children; and two grandchildren.

When asked about his efforts uncovering jazz’s past, Mr. Cuscuna often said the most rewarding part was musicians thanking him for giving their work another life. He described how drummer Elvin Jones and sax player Hank Mobley hugged him at clubs after albums were rereleased.

One day while walking along Broadway in Manhattan, Mr. Cuscuna recalled, jazz horn player Howard Johnson yelled to him from a passing cab, asking if he had nailed down some elusive detail about a long-ago recording session.

“The approval and the enthusiasm of the artists who made the music was very important to me,” Mr. Cuscuna wrote.