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6 days ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
Being a baby, alone in a semi-dark room. I’m just waking up from an afternoon nap and I am aware of my mother’s presence and absence. I know she is outside but I also know she doesn’t want me to need her. I know she’s not coming to hold me. I have no memory of not being creative. I feel there was never a time when I was not creating. Hope. It’s so rare to feel hopeful about anything. When I feel a bit of hope I think: There is more to see, discover, build and enjoy.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
My grandmother was a very religious woman who loved poetry. Tennyson was her favourite. At her funeral, I read Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar”. My mother is starting to forget that her parents are dead. There’s a lot of advice out there that says don’t tell Alzheimer’s patients their loved ones are no longer alive when they ask for them because it can cause distress.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
I guess I’m starting a new project called One of These Days We’ll Both Be Fine which was something my mother said to me earlier this year when we were both having a bad day. At the time it was slightly sad, a little funny, but also comforting.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
My first true memory (a memory not based on something my parents told me later) is of playing hide-and-seek with my little sister. I was maybe 3 or 4, so she would have been 2 or 3 at the time. I became overwhelmed with fear while hiding from (or with, I can’t remember) her, to the point that eventually she had to console me (thanks, Maggie).
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedLast week there was a shooting at the mall. Ever bold, you claimed it gave us one more talking point, our legs entwined at the back of the cinema, breath snatching. The daylight squeezes, drips over us on the way home. Always a risk—walk on the field or the road, our prayers wiped away with the orange sky while animals grazed.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
My earliest memories of creativity have always involved music. My father would often sing to me, as a child, and sometimes he’d make up lyrics to songs. We had a keyboard, even though no one in the family knew how to play it, but he’d still make up tunes on the keys. I would sing with him, as a toddler and three-year-old. My father would also create lullabies this way. He’d sing me to sleep with, “Eidelweiss,” with different, made-up lyrics—usually my name, and affirmations that he loved me.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
I made up a fun game. Well, maybe I didn’t quite make it up. Perhaps it’s a version of a game I played as a child, but I revamped it yesterday when visiting my mother in the hospital and a little at a loss for how we could pass the time.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
My mother has Alzheimer’s nearing late stage. The hospital wanted to discharge her—back to an independent living situation where she was falling multiple times a day. Doctors with the pushiness of telemarketers tried to force us to send her back to her apartment. One day a PSW who had been caring for her all week whispered in my ear, “Keep fighting. She can’t go home”. From what I’ve come to understand, this is common. The system is bursting at the seams.
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
The Authors for eSims online book auction is now OPEN, until Sunday May 19 at 5 pm. I’m participating in the Authors for eSims for Gaza auction fundraiser. Bid on over 110 autographed books and special prize bundles from your favourite authors (novels! poetry collections! children’s books! memoirs! feedback on your own writing! signed copies for your whole book club! characters named after you! and more!).
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1 week ago | 
sendmylovetoanyone.substack.com | Kathryn Mockler
This probably isn’t the first memory, but this came to mind: me, a tiny girl walking with my dad in the aisles of Beaver Lumber, taking like twenty little hurried steps for every one gigantic step he took. I was always writing illustrated stories when I was young, and I still have some, but the first actual memory I can conjure is of a pretend magazine article I was writing about my Cabbage Patch Kids going on vacation.
