We can no longer ignore that there is a host of reality television stars who are educating our kids.

I don’t like it and I’d prefer to bury my head in the sand like an ostrich. That tact however, will leave me starved for air and my nieces and nephews without the benefit of a moral and cultural counterpoint to the “GTL” (gym, tan, laundry) lifestyle.

I’m an aunt to forty nieces and nephews all by relation and many of them they love the “Jersey Shore.” Their facination with these pop-culture nitwits finds me reaching for my rosary beads. It’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I sit back and let these morally devoid characters corrupt my little darlings. So, what’s an auntie to do?

Here’s what I came up with. Read more

While I’m off enjoying some time with family and friends you might want to check out my latest piece at Savvy Auntie.

This time of the year is tough for many. Nostalgia has a way of creeping in at our holidays tables. For those actively grieving, this time of the year can be riddled with pangs of sadness. Even more so, people who long to have children struggle as well. In my latest column at Savvy Auntie, I share some tips on how to survive this time of year when dealing with infertility or longing for children of our own.

Gobble, gobble!

Happy Funny Friday!

Wonderful news! This column is now coming to you courtesy of Laugh Magazine!

Here in Delaware Laugh Magazine is a free publication dedicated to laughter. Pick up a copy at your local favorite eatieries or coffee shops or you may visit online at Laugh Magazine.

Ever wonder exactly how special you really are when someone tells you you’re special?

“Oh, you’re so special,” people say to one another.

When I see things like this video–a tribute that made me laugh, cry and think, I wonder if I am this special. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean.

When I first saw it and the video came to an end, I gently closed the lid of my laptop and did some thinking.

I want to live my life well. I want to always do the right thing–and be big enough to offer an apology when I fall short, (which I will because I’m human, despite my best efforts).

Today, I am posting something that made me laugh, cry and imprinted a smile in my soul.

I hope I am the kind of friend, wife, therapist, aunt, sister, daughter, daughter-in-law, etc. that would make me deserving of a tribute like this.

Enjoy!

Tuesday Tips

This tip is for Dads- buy your daughter(s) flowers.

When I was six years old, our door bell rang. It was February 14, 1973 and my twin sister and I were first-graders.

Just off the school bus, Gee and I were in our room peeling off our parochial school uniform jumpers when my Mom stood at the doorway and said, “Did you hear the door bell? You girls might want to go see who’s at the door.”

Our home was perched on Nectar Lane, a cul-de-sac in an early 1970′s suburban subdivision in bucolic Chester County, Pennsylvania. Growing up a knock at the door or chime of the doorbell was a quotidian occurrence.  We didn’t lock our doors, the kids played outside long after the sunset and in the winters we ice-skated on the two neighborhood ponds.  When the door bell, rang, Gee and I figured it was either Doree, Dayna or Lori, our childhood friends, sporting rosy cheeks with ice-skates slung over their shoulders anxious to ask, “Can the twins come out to play?”

My Mom rarely displayed a sense of urgency, so when she suggested we go see who was at the door, Gee and I ran around the hallway corner, pulling sweaters over our heads. To this day, I’ll never forget what greeted us when we got to the end of the hallway and made the sharp right passed the iron railing toward the front door.

There with two long white boxes with bright pink ribbons tied around them, stood my Dad. Leaning on the top box, he signed a piece of paper and offered a hearty, proud thanks to a delivery boy bundled up in a black peacoat standing outside on our front stoop.

I remember being slightly confused. The whole scene felt foreign but the grin on my Dad’s face spoke of a seminal event.

He slammed the door shut, turned and handed us the two foot packages. “For you girls. Happy Valentine’s Day!”

The four of us walked into the living room and there on our wool, orange serpentine couch, Gee and I tore open the boxes. Inside on a cushion of baby pink crepe paper were a dozen delicate pink roses. The buds barely peaked open. Resting on top of the bouquets were small, furry grey squirls with red bows tied around their necks and a sign that read, “Be mine.”

It’s one of the first times in my life I ever remember feeling like I mattered.

“For us, Daddy?” we asked. My Mom responded because my Dad was too teary to talk. “Daddy wanted to be the first man to send you girls flowers.”

Gee and I kept those squirrels and the pink bows from the long white boxes tied around our canopy beds well into our teenage years. I’ve been a lucky girl to have been blessed with many a flower delivery over the years but every time I’ve answered the door to a delivery man, I am reminded that my Daddy was the first.

When is a time when you felt like you mattered?

Happy Sunday, Everyone!

This week’s Sacred Sunday I am encoring a piece I wrote last year about my Dad in honor of his birthday. It’s Part I of what I’m calling The Daddy Diaries.

Spit shined, dusted off and anxious to take center stage again, please give a warm, Sacred Sunday welcome to, “Don’t Look With Your Dawba.”

Enjoy!

“Don’t Look With Yaw Dawba”

Two weekends ago The Bird and I flew to Florida to see my Dad for his 95th birthday.

During our time in the sunshine state, we did all the sorts of “geezer” things you’d normally do with a 95 year old, including playing a tense game of Bingo at the Country Club.

BINGO

Let me say this about Bingo-it’s seductive. The swagger with which it carries itself, in tandem with the promise of providing a fun-filled evening, could probably cause even the likes of a Mother Theresa to buckle at the knees. DO NOT fall for this trickery. Bingo is a sporting event that in a hot second can turn ugly. I’ll give Bingo points for brains-shacking up in innocuous locations, preying on the vulnerable in church halls, cruise ships and the occasional country club. (Ok, not exactly the vulnerable, I’ll admit).

Six years ago, on an early March evening, three weeks after my mother passed away, my father asked me if I wanted to go with him to Bingo.

Prior to my mother’s death, on visits down to Florida to see my parents, it was customary for all of us to go to the club to play Bingo on Thursday nights. The thought of going back to a familiar place without my mother made my stomach twist and my eyes swim in tears. Not wanting to alarm my Dad with the intensity of my sorrow though, I smiled and said, “Sure, Daddy.”

STUGs

That evening, as my Dad pulled open the door to the club and we climbed the stairs to the main dining room, I swallowed hard. The smell of the dinner buffet laid out against the far wall sucker-punched me. The odor waiving off the warming trays was reminiscent of the odor of the rehab center my Mom stayed in after she recovered from brain surgery three months earlier. I nearly threw up.

My blind sighted run-in with this olfactory foe is called a STUG-a term coined by Dr. Therese Rando, psychologist, thanatologist and grief expert as a subsequent, temporary, upsurge of grief. Dr. Rando further defines STUGs as “brief periods of intense grief which occur when a catalyst reminds one of the absence of the loved one or resurrects memories of the death, the loved one, or feelings about the loss.”

Refocusing my attention on my Dad quelled my nausea as we gathered our Bingo packets, daubers and other Bingo accouterments.

The truth is at the time, he was lost and so was I.
“B-5….0-65…I -19…” the Bingo announcer called out. With a New England bravado that would make even a Tom Brady cower in the corner, this woman’s affect was more like a schoolmarm than a rabble-rousing cruise ship director. (Where’s Julie from The Love Boat when you need her?)

The schoolmarm

About half way into the evening, she took a break from calling numbers, passed the microphone on to her partner and began to walk her beat. Wandering from table to table, she policed the strategies of those stupid enough to come out to play.

When people are grieving the simple task of focusing on nine different Bingo cards simultaneously, can feel like the equivalent of solving the quadratic equation. My head scratches synchronized with the number calling, clued her in I was having trouble.

As she meandered around the room, she spotted me.

“Honey,” she hollered across the room in her thick Boston accent, “Don’t look with yaw dawbuh.”

My face flushed and I coiled my head and neck into my sweater as far as I could without compromising my ability to breathe. I was the youngest person in the room by at least three decades. I felt like a kindergartner who couldn’t even recognize something as elementary as her primary colors.

But when the banquet manager entered the dining room from behind the swinging double doors of the kitchen, what happened next paled in comparison to my unsolicited lesson in how to play Bingo.

My Dad waved down the manager as if he was stranded on the side of the road fatally injured. The quiet hush in the room was pierced by my father. “Gosh damn it-it’s freezing in here. Turn on the heat or something. Good, gosh damn it. It’s always so damn cold in here.”

“SSSSShhhhhh!” The crowd shouted as if to say, “Have you no respect for the game?” To an outside observer, it might appear my father had not been schooled properly on the etiquette of Bingo but the truth is he’s indulgent. Ever heard of the book When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple?

The road of embarrassment

The embarrassment didn’t stop there. As the evening drew on my Dad shouted, “Slow down!” whenever he struggled to keep up, to which the crowd replied in unanimity, “SSHHHHH.”

Note: If you haven’t ever been to a serious game of Bingo here’s a head’s up: They generally don’t play straight Bingo. They play things called The Wedding Cake, Five Around and B’s and O’s and quite frankly it takes a trained eye to keep track of 9 cards at a time in goofy patterns.

The combination of being singled out by the cranky Bingo volunteer, my Dad’s outbursts and the odor off of the buffet had me eyeing the exits.

The embers of a grief stricken meltdown burned just above the surface-a meltdown not for public consumption.

Many of those in attendance that evening knew full well my mother’s body was barely cold. In the past I knew the crowd could be unforgiving, but that night, I was either particularly sensitive from deeply mourning the death of my mother or the crowd was particularly insensitive. In retrospect it was probably a little of both.

My husband to the rescue

The game finally ended and when we returned safely home, I found a spot to crawl into and I called The Bird. Wrapped inside primal sobs, I said something I’m sure was incoherent that went something like:

“That…*sniff*…*sniff*…*sniff*…was HORRIBLE *sniff*…*sob*…*hyperventilate*…His wife just died and *sniff*…those …(blow nose)…people were meaaan!”

Bingo that night traumatized me but those early months following my mother’s death just about anything could bring on a nuclear, emotional meltdown.

Even though that March evening, Bingo was brutal, I managed to move through those first weeks of mourning and this past visit to my Dad’s, I didn’t allow my former Bingo encounter to shackle me to the house.

This time there seemed to be a palpable shift in the mood of the room. The crowd’s overall tone was markedly less adversarial to which I attributed the canning of the caustic Boston Bingo volunteer and the therapeutic value of time passing.

While I could take or leave Bingo-being the youngin’ that I am, I went that night in early March almost seven years ago not only for my Dad but also for my Mom who would not have wanted my Dad to go alone.

And in the middle of “B-14….0-75″ a few weeks ago, sacredness surrounded us. Being with The Bird, my brother and my Dad felt holy.

Footprints on our souls

Moments like this leave footprints on our souls if we take the time to recognize them.  Ron Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas, speaks eloquently about seeing the eternal in the ordinary in his book, The Shattered Lantern.

For me, this was a reminder that with a simple shift in perspective sacredness comes into focus. Rather than ruminate on how my heart shrivels up in pain whenever we enter the club, especially to play Bingo, I revel in the hallowness of this time between me and my Daddy.

Suggested Reading: The Shattered Lantern by Ron Rolheiser

When I groaned at turning the ripe old age of thirty-five, my Mom, Doris, (God rest her soul *making the sign of the cross*) said to me, “Honey, birthdays are a good thing. Just consider the alternative.”

On September 23rd my Dad will celebrate his ninety-sixth birthday and like my Mom said, it sure beats the alternative, no matter how old you get.

In deference to my Italian female predilection toward melodrama, this birthday is without question, cause for both celebration and concern. Read more

If you’re Catholic, like me, you probably know that Sunday was the Feast of the Assumption.

Did you put your feet in the ocean?

Growing up we spent our summers at the Jersey Shore, long before there was ever a “Snooki” or any sort of a “Situation.”

In cars bursting with all the summer essentials, and trunks my Dad called “footlockers” tethered to the roof of each car, my parents picked up my identical twin sister and me on the last day of school. Bound for Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, we didn’t head back north until Labor Day.

Memories

Some of my fondest memories of our summers at the shore are the mornings when my Mom and I would bike the twenty blocks to daily Mass at our parish, The Assumption.

On our early morning jaunts, we peddled passed my Grandmom’s bright pink, stucco duplex and through mouth-watering ribbons of fresh bacon and eggs that escaped from inside the homes on Seaview Avenue.

My Mom relished the early morning hours, when the sun was just yawning. Me, I preferred to wait until most of the world was on its second cup of coffee. But every year on August fifteenth, I rose early enough to join her for Mass. Read more

(Bianca)

Ever feel like, “Gee whiz?”

That’s how I feel as I write this post.

Gee whiz.

My Mom reserved that expression for times when there really wasn’t anything else to say.

Times like the day I called her to tell her I that I had been struggling to get pregnant, and the time when I was visiting my parents in Florida and my husband called to tell me that our dog, Bella was so sick they weren’t sure she was going to make it.  While I sat in tears on the powder blue lazy boy, my cell phone in my lap, she kissed me on the forehead, sighed and said, “Oh, Steffi. Gee whiz.”

Today, if I called her to tell her the “bitter” of my week, I’m sure she’d say, “Oh, Steffi, gee whiz.” Read more

This evening while winding down, a commercial for the movie Eat, Pray, Love, based on the wildly popular New York Times bestseller of the same name came on.

The commercial stirred inside me the kind of nostalgia that comes from daydreaming about your first kiss. Read more

Seven years ago, when my Mom passed away, I stood at her bedside with my Dad, brothers and twin sister, both heartbroken and relieved. The relief came from knowing she would no longer suffer the depravity of cancer. Her last breath released her from its vicious vice.

The heartbreak, well, that’s obvious I’m sure.

Regardless of how old we are when our parents die, (I was thirty-seven years old) I’m here to tell you it hurts. It can hurt- a whole lot…for a long time.

Sadly, our grief as adult children mourning the loss of our Moms and Dads is often disenfranchised.

It seems “natural” for our parents to die when they are elderly- true.  Somehow though, natural is considered (by many) as directly proportionate to how long an appropriate mourning period prolongs, or worse, if it’s appropriate at all.

My own father is 95 3/4 years old. Trust me when I tell you, I will mourn his loss for as long as I-that’s I-need to-and it won’t be the standard expected three days I assure you. He is my Dad, (sometimes I still call him Daddy-we’re Italian what can I tell ya) his presence in this world is the bedrock upon which my sense of safety rests (as was my Mom’s).

In my practice and in my work at hospice, I’ve seen many adult children struggle. They have friends and co-workers, etc who remark, “Oh your Mom/Dad lived a good long life. God bless ‘em.”

These same well-intentioned people go on to shrug their shoulders, pat you on the back and move on AND often expect you to do the same in a very short time.

Parental loss for adult children is disenfranchised grief at it’s finest.

Lois Akner, in her book “How to Survive the Loss of a Parent: A Guide for Adults” (William Morrow and Co.), speaks on this idea of disenfranchised grief for adult children whose parents die.

“If you lose a child or a husband, there’s an enormous amount of support. But if you lose a parent, you get two weeks to grieve and then you’re expected to be back to yourself.”

There are many factors that influence the grief and mourning process. One of the most important is the relationship the bereft shared with the deceased. If they were close, then the grieving period will be longer. I’ll be writing a post about each factor in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Dressing my Mom for the funeral director to take her was a gift. Along with my brother we dressed her and kissed her. It was our last tender act as her caregivers.

Notwithstanding the tender side of her death, her dying catapulted me to a place overgrown with unfamiliarity and shrouded by a pervasive dark fog of sheer uncertainty.

What scared me was the sudden realization that everything as I knew it had now changed. This is the theme of my memoir but a few months ago I came across a quote that articulated with precision how I felt that cold, February night. (I’d give credit if I knew to whom it went but I don’t).

There are times in a life

when we come to a trapeze moment….

It’s that moment in time

when what we’ve known

will no longer hold us-

and what awaits us

has not yet appeared.

Losing a loved one, at any age, most certainly can find us suspended in a “trapeze” moment.

Death leaves us with a loss of our former assumptive world. Often people go on spiritual quests, seeking for a way to make sense out of the world again-to restore a sense of safety & security that the death left shattered.

This takes time and in her book, The Five Ways We Grieve, author Susan Berger talks about the five different types of grievers. Indeed, some of us are seekers. (I am a pure seeker).

So, my dear friends who know the pain of losing parents, rest reassured your grief is legitimate. It might very well lead to a trapeze moment and if so, you’re in good company according to me and Susan Berger.

Have you lost a parent? I’d love to hear your experiences.

*To comment look for the “add a comment” in the box below the post with the other blog tags. Click on “add a comment” and share away. Comments are a great way to support each other on this topic.

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Suggested Resources on this topic:

How to Survive  the Loss of a Parent: A Guide for Adults, by Lois Akner

GriefNet.org

HelloGrief.com

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