Sunday Whispers

 Just the other day I saw a Facebook post from someone celebrating their deceased loved one’s birthday. One statement that stood out to me was that they said they have not grieved or mourned their loved one’s death. The judgmental person in me said in my head, uhm yes you have. This person I know personally has been in multiple drunk stupors, drug binges, and Facebook crash outs over the years since the time of the death. Although my first thoughts were based on pure judgment, I quickly started to feel bad. Everyone’s grieving and mourning is different. It does not look the same on everyone. I am quite sure they were probably taught to believe that grief looks like sadness, isolation, and dark clouds. From my experience, it is a dark cloud, but the person under that cloud may be expressing it a different way. When I lost my brother at 13, I acted out in many different ways, not realizing I was grieving and mourning. Now my grieving and mourning look different. I don’t have the sp...

 "All my life I had to fight" lol. But honestly, those words resonate with me so much these days. All my life I have been a caregiver. I cared for my parents, cousin, and grandmother. I never really sat back to realize how much these experiences have shaped me to become the person I am, was, and am evolving to. I don’t know where I am in this life journey. But what I do know is that the journey has not been easy, and it has forced me to unlearn and reevaluate my life choices and the things I can and cannot tolerate. From a little girl, my parents have always been sickly. They had me going into their 40s after living a very rough and wild life. My parents were in the streets, for lack of better words, and they did not take care of their health. My father had a kidney removed and was on dialysis from around the time I was 9-ish, I believe, until his death when I was 22. That is an extremely long time to be on dialysis, and it created so many other health problems. So through a...

Father’s Day just passed, and I want to write about my old boyfriend, Tyrin. Tyrin passed away on December 5, 2022. That’s a day I will never forget. I’ll write more about him later, but today I want to talk about how great of a father he was and how I’m still trying to understand God’s plans for me in all of this. Tyrin took really good care of my baby. We started talking and dating when I was barely pregnant, and he had just graduated high school. It's a little embarrassing to admit, since I’m six years older than him and obviously, I was already pregnant when we met. But from the very beginning, I told him straight up that I was pregnant. His exact words were: “That’s not stopping my program.” And it didn’t. I had just left a horrible relationship literally the day before I found out I was pregnant. That relationship was so toxic I’ll have to tell that story another day. I told my mom I was pregnant, and she was conflicted. She wanted me to have her grandchild so badly, but sh...

My daddy was found face down, slumped over the couch. Dead. It looked like his body had been pushed from his usual sitting chair onto the couch based on the way he was positioned. I couldn’t believe it. He was gone. At home. No complaints of feeling sick beforehand. My father had many close calls that sent him to the hospital or a nursing home for stretches at a time, but he always bounced back. When he was better, he’d come home, and sometimes he came back stronger than when he left. He had been on dialysis for years, probably since 2005, and only had one kidney. But he always made it. Until he didn’t. He died in 2018. Just days before, I had a strange feeling that one of my parents was about to die. I thought it would be my mom because her health was declining. I even took her to the beach in her wheelchair and pushed her down the boardwalk for a few hours. Two days later, my father died. Suddenly. He was just fine. My dad sold drugs up until the day he died. I had never seen my f...

I originally started this blog to release the pain and resentment I felt toward my family for the lack of support I received while grieving. It was a safe space for me to finally say the things I was holding in. But just a day after I posted my first blog, my cousin Tony passed away.  Tony was more like an uncle to me, he was always a phone call away. Over the last few years, I had pretty much become his secretary, handling all his affairs because his health was declining. Just a week before he died, I randomly decided to host a BBQ for my estranged uncle and invited Tony. My uncle came super late, but Tony showed up on time with his daughters and grandkids, something that rarely happened. We had such a good time together, full of laughs and family joy. Looking back, I know that it was God who placed that gathering on my heart. That BBQ was the last time his kids saw him alive. Tony passed on May 14. Six days later, on May 20, my sister, my mother’s other daughter passed away, to...

 My mother died two days after Mother’s Day in 2023. She had been preparing me for her death for years, but I wasn’t prepared for all the bullshit that came after. My mom was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer also known as bile duct cancer, less than a week before she passed. She also had a mass in her kidneys that the doctors suspected was cancer, but they focused on the bile duct cancer because it was causing the most catastrophic issues. She lost mobility in her legs about three weeks after I gave birth to her first and only grandchild in December of 2019. She spent the last part of her life confined to a hospital bed in the house for almost four years. My mom was tired. She fought a long, painful battle to stay alive. She used to tell me she just wanted to live long enough to see her granddaughter run down the hallway—right where her hospital bed faced. And she did. Mother’s Day was May 14th. She passed away on May 16th. My birthday is May 31st, and my college...