About a year ago, in late November 2016, Steve went to visit one of our clients in North Carolina. It’s a long drive — too much for one day.
Before he left, we were talking about Mark, and grief, and processing, and how we differ. I had been concerned that Steve, still operating under his usual habit of putting BIG EMOTIONAL THINGS in tightly-lidded boxes and stowing them on a shelf in his mental closet, was going to discover – far down the road – that grief only gets bigger and scarier, the longer you put it off and refuse to face it. I kept telling him: “Talk to God. Talk to Mark.”
ness into your every day life right when you were actually having a kind of decent, semi-normal day.
After enormous (and mostly age-appropriate!) fun with long-time friends in Lexington, Kentucky in the middle of this past month, Steve and I took a side trip, as we began the drive home, to visit Camp Shawnee – about 2 hours east of Lexington, in Floyd County. It was here, we had recently learned, that a beautiful outdoor chapel was dedicated – on Mark’s (future) birth date, in 1955, no less – to the memory of my grandfather, John T. Parker, who we did not have the privilege of knowing (he died of leukemia when my dad was just 22).
BLUE SKIES REMIND ME 