Search Results: Found 32 Articles

Family & Relationships

Can You Embrace Every Season Of Life?
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 2 minutes, 14 seconds
Pete Seeger adapted Ecclesiastes 3.1 for the lyrics to his song Turn! Turn! Turn! The song soulfully announces, “There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven-“ Each time I talk to my daughter I am reminded of the wisdom in those verses. Kathryn is the mother of a three-year old and twin eight month olds, a job and passion that require...
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Family & Relationships

The Decision is Yours to Make
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 2 minutes, 35 seconds
When she put her head on the dinning room table, the entire family just stared at my mom. Finally, my son, Matthew said, “Grandmother are you okay?” No she wasn’t. My father had died three months earlier and this was her first holiday without him in over 50 years. She was struggling; we were all struggling. Dad’s funeral had been emotionally charged and strained my relationship with my...
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Family & Relationships

Getting the Answers Before It's Too Late
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 3 minutes, 21 seconds
Her response to my email was disappointing but not completely unexpected. In the oodles and oodles of photographs that I have been scanning, I found three 8 ½ by 11 black and white wedding photographs. It was not my parents wedding or anyone else in the family. Candidly, my family has a history of eloping so I was pretty certain these must have been friends of the family. My father was par...
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Family & Relationships

What’s on the Books for the Weekend: Letter Writing
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 2 minutes, 10 seconds
I am a words person. I even have favorite words such as arugula and bok choy. They are fun words; speaking them into existence always feels like a party. For the most part I prefer communicating important or emotional ideas through the written word instead of the spoken word. It gives me time to think through what I want to communicate without all the emotion of body language cluttering u...
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Family & Relationships

Feeling the Loss

Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 1 minute, 44 seconds
Sometimes I forget she is dead. Mainly it happens when I am driving and I involuntarily think, “I should call Mom”. Then I remember; then I feel sad. It is not an overwhelming sadness just a fleeting shadow that reminds me that I can no longer talk to her. At those times, I call my sister.Julia’s experiences are similar and she understands. We chat long enough to share our re...
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Family & Relationships

Connecting With The One I Love
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 2 minutes, 41 seconds
I have jokingly said that life is “all about me” but in reality when you love and care for another person what happens in your life touches them too. While it was grueling for me to travel back and forth to Florida to care for my mother in response to each one of her health emergencies, it was draining for Marty to be left behind to wait and care for our home alone. When he dropped me off...
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Family & Relationships

Welcoming the Weekend: Tackling a Big Project
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 1 minute, 48 seconds
As I mentioned last Friday, I have become the family historian who is responsible for sorting and organizing my parent’s family photos. My father was extremely organized and had meticulously labeled thousands of photos. My mother on the other hand was the yin to his yang and just tossed photos into the drawers of her nightstand along with receipts and other bits of paper....
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Family & Relationships

There is a Season
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 2 minutes, 59 seconds
After three months of bouncing back and forth between hospitals and rehab centers, the decision has been made to call in hospice and allow mom to go home. She has been stroking continuously during the previous 12 weeks, losing a piece of herself each time. The only pain she has experienced during this period was from the daily blood tests, MRI’s with contrast...
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Family & Relationships

Retirement: How Much Money Do You Need?
Posted: 11 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 5 minutes, 50 seconds
How much money do you really need to retire? We see commercials on TV that bandy around figures like 1.2 or 1.5 million dollars. Is that reality or is that what the major financial houses need, to make your investment valuable to them? Over the next few weeks, Footsteps will take a look at what it takes to retire and you decide whether “retirement” is in yo...
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Family & Relationships

When to Call Hospice
Posted: 12 years ago | By: Christine Somers | In: Family & Relationships | Read Time: 4 minutes, 49 seconds
Ours is not the only family to find it difficult to navigate the end of life journey of a family member.  A friend of mine tells the story of her own family’s response to her grandmother dying. Her 93 year-old grandmother was taken to the hospital because her body appeared to be shutting down. After a thorough examination, it was discovered that she had a blockage in her i...
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