Tenderness and death

and not knowing what to do.

April 6, 2025—Waxing moon in Leo

Loves,

I’ve been thinking about transparency and courage. About vulnerability and honesty and disclosing. I’ve been thinking about how our stories told¹ are like hyphae—those physical strands that form the mycelial networks of co-nourishment underpinning resilient forests.

I’ve been thinking—and talking with friends—about what I as a writer, and especially as someone who facilitates transformative writing spaces, owe readers and students. How much vulnerability? How much blood on the page?

My barometer has always been to ask myself, what good will it do to tell this story? The answer I’m looking for is that telling the story will help someone feel seen or heard or like they’re not alone. If my story meets this criteria, I’ve nearly always simply taken a deep breath and told it.

Until now.

Well, February, actually.

February 11, more precisely.

Since that morning my thinking has been disjointed and dysrhythmic and I haven’t known what to do.

Shot by the author in a local park on a truly grim, gray day.

At some point during that endless night/morning I wrote this:

My mother just died in her sleep.

It was a gentle passing full of both sorrow and relief after the up/down/limbo roller coaster of the past few years.

I keep telling everyone I don't know what to do, and I don't, really, other than ride the ebb and flow of sorrow, do my life and work the best I can, and treat everyone—me, the family, the world—very, very tenderly.

Her death has provoked a strange, unexpected, exhalation of words. As her life hung in the limbo of the long, slow, forgetting, I’ve felt as if I was holding my breath. Only it wasn't my breath being held, it was my writing.

Is tenderness the answer to this, too?

I’ve gotten in my own way several times at this point in this article. (Post? I never know what to call these missives.) I keep rewriting and wanting to impose a logical structure and letting my (very snooty and critical) inner editor bully me. But with deep respect to structure and form and all the proper ways to present an article, today I say codswallop. I’m invoking tenderness.

Sometimes tenderness is seeing the beauty in dying tulips. Shot by the author in the before times. Otherwise known as January.

The point of me sharing all of this isn’t so much to talk about my mother’s death as it is to talk about the disorientation and not knowing that we experience when we are shaken from our foundation. And to invite (implore!) anyone awash in this state of befuddlement, whatever the cause, to invoke tenderness and/or her/their cousins compassion, kindness, and gentleness.

It’s taken some pretty audacious tenderness to navigate, with lurching unsteadiness, this awkward, grief/confusion, freeze/spate two-step. But it bought me space to flail and founder and fail and right myself and do it all again. And again. To write myself into and out of more muzzy corners than I thought could live in my head. To go through too many boxes of tissues and to still catch sight of my puffy, pale face and pause to whisper, You’re OK. You can do this.

So, I think I’ll stop here and post this. There’s more to say (I did say I’ve been writing a lot) but there’s also a next time.

For anyone who needs to hear it, You’re OK. You can do this.

With tenderness,

Tracie

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I’m Tracie Nichols, poet, facilitator, HSP, over-thinker, introvert, and woman of deepening years. When I’m not doing managing director things for the Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN), I create seasonal word adventures for shy but curious people. More at tracienichols.com.

1. Not told just to humans, told to any being in our ecosystem. But that’s another story.