loss
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On the Guilt of Moving On

This was one of those things I was anticipating in my grief, but couldn’t fully imagine until I had actually experienced it. The memories fade, the pain is less violent. Time works in strange ways, and dulls the edges that were so sharp in those first years. And yet, there are days, like today, when… Continue reading
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Where do the dead go?

All of us who grieve know how difficult the days – sometimes weeks – preceding and following an anniversary, birthday, or special holiday (such as ‘father’s day’ in my case) can be. It may be the case that you mysteriously wake up one morning, feeling tense, irritable, particularly emotional, without understanding the origin of this… Continue reading
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Où vont les morts ?

All of us who grieve know how difficult the days – sometimes weeks – preceding and following an anniversary, birthday, or special holiday (such as ‘father’s day’ in my case) can be. It may be the case that you mysteriously wake up one morning, feeling tense, irritable, particularly emotional, without understanding the origin of this… Continue reading
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All that I Lost in Grief

These two years have been marked by pain and a deep sense of un-rootedness. In losing my father I lost not only a parent but a foundation, a source of love, and the family that I once knew. Death creeps in like the water of a flood and always threatens to crumble all that you… Continue reading
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Seven Months After my Father’s Death, the Pain Grows Deeper Everyday

It has been nearly seven months since I watched my father pass away. And at the six-month mark, half an orbit around the sun, I suddenly felt something I think all people in deep grief fear: I felt for the first time that I was becoming used to my father’s absence. A month and a Continue reading
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Notes on the Inescapable and Irremediable Solitude of Grief (and learning to cherish it)

When my father died, so did a part of myself. Continue reading
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Waiting for Death to Come: my experience with anticipatory grief

In October, 2019, my father was diagnosed with a very rare and terribly aggressive brain tumor which would come to claim his life three years and a month later. At the time of the diagnosis, I was 19 years old. After receiving a first batch of treatments in 2019 and the beginning of 2020, my… Continue reading
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An Open Letter for my (late) Father’s Birthday

My name is Soline Van de Moortele, and I would like to personally thank you for visiting my blog and reading my posts. I am dedicated to creating a series of blog posts on my personal experience with losing my father at 22, as well as provide a platform for other people to share their Continue reading
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Grieving my Past Life

Realizing that grief goes far beyond death in life is a difficult realizaton to have. What is tricky about grief when you lose someone you love is that you cannot confront the object of your grief directly, as they are gone. Your world becomes full of the person’s absence, but the very phrase hints to… Continue reading
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An Introduction to my Grief

3.5 months; 109 days; 2616 hours. These are measures of the amount of time which has gone by since I saw my father take his last, slow and quiet breath. Although I had three years to prepare myself for the possibility of his premature death in my life, nothing could prepare me for the experience… Continue reading
About Me
My name is Soline and I am a French-American 23-year-old Philosophy student based in Montreal, QC. This is a personal blog dedicated to grief, grieving, and the ways I learn to live with what at times is unbearable.
