Why I Created The Lantern Room. 🥰 People often ask me why grief feels so important to me. I think it’s important that I tell some of my story for context 🥰🌱🏮 The truth is, grief has been woven through my life from a very young age. On my thirteenth birthday, my mum married her second husband. Just a month later, he died. None of us knew that years of alcoholism had caused so much damage to his body. Within weeks of their wedding, he was in hospital. His leg had to be amputated, but it was too late. A blood clot travelled to his heart, and he died. Overnight, my mum became a widow. I was just thirteen. What followed shaped me in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years. I found myself carrying responsibilities no child should ever have to carry. I helped organise the funeral and was expected to be the strong one, supporting the adults around me while trying to make sense of my own grief. I was taken to view his body because I was told I was needed. It was an experience that stayed with me long after everyone else had moved on. Just over a year later, my mum remarried and moved to Spain, shortly before my sixteenth birthday. It was another profound loss, and one that left me navigating much of my teenage life on my own. By the time I was sixteen, I was already working in care. Not long afterwards, I was offered a role on a palliative care unit. Looking back now, it feels as though all those difficult experiences had quietly prepared me to sit beside people during the hardest moments of their lives. It became work that I loved deeply. Grief, however, continued to find me. My sister died at just thirty-six from alcoholism, leaving behind her teenage daughter. The grandfather who had always made me feel loved passed away, and I wasn’t told until after he had been cremated. Then, years later, my mum’s third husband died suddenly while they were living in Spain. At eighteen years old, six months pregnant, I flew to another country to organise another funeral. It felt as though I had stepped back into the same role I had been given as a child.

My friend is alive but ..... there is a part of me that wishes he wasn't. He had a terrible motorcycle accident on Sunday. He's 73 and rides his motorcycle A LOT! He has over 350,000 miles on the bike (named Boomer). This accident caused by another driver, not fault of his own. It happens. Not being seen by motorcyclists is something that is relatively common. This accent has left him very broken and in a state that could be..... vegetative. We don't know yet. His body is broken. Shatter pelvis, shattered wrist. Bleeding and swelling in the brain. So I am grieving. We used to be partners. We dated for 2 years. We did not end our relationship badly, we just wanted different things. We have remained friends. I am grieving someone who is still alive. These pics are from our many cross country road trips in 2012 and 2013.

Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have turned 101. This poster is from his funeral in 2014, provided by students at the high school where he worked. Blueberries y’all! About 5 years prior, when the doctors commended him on his health and asked what did he do to appear so healthy, BLUEBERRIES was his reply. Organic if possible. (Liked them with oatmeal groats especially.) He stressed himself by shoveling 200 feet of New York State winter snow, from his home to the street. Had cardiac arrest in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, before getting out of the truck to get his coffee before heading to school. He was a Maroon from a Jamaican mom and president of the African American Men’s Assoc., which took students to visit colleges and mentored many. So happy earth-day Dad! Without you I wouldn’t be (by God’s leave). I pray everyone is cool and gathered on this fourth of July…. BTW everyone agrees my dad was Waaaay Coool. His name was Conrad, better known as Con or Connie. Today he might be called Rad, like a friend of mine, who spells his name ConRAD. We get the coolness either way...

The Lantern Room We are all here for just a moment. Some moments are long, some heartbreakingly short. And when yours passed on, the world didn’t stop… even though yours did. Grief has a quiet way of teaching us that love doesn’t end where a life does. It lingers in recipes, in songs, in old photographs, in laughter that catches us by surprise, and in the stories we are brave enough to keep telling. So here, we light a lantern. Not to guide them home, but to remind ourselves that the love they left behind still has a place to shine. One story. One memory. One small creative moment at a time. 🏮🥰🏮🥰🏮