My name is Sally.
I am a writer who writes to help those feeling stuck in grief and pain to process loss and experience wholeness.
In 2010, my life turned upside down when my thirty-four year old daughter took her own life. At the moment of learning of her death, and in the days, months and years to come, I wondered if I would ever find a path forward when my life no longer made sense. Nothing in my life made sense to me on that fateful day, and in the many days and months that followed.
Jerry Stittser, in his book, A Grace Disguised, wrote "Catastrophic loss is like undergoing a loss of our identity.” I don’t know that I fully understood in that moment of learning of my daughter’s death just how much I would struggle with knowing who I was. My old identity as a mother of five adult children, a grandmother, a wife did not just shift, it was shattered. The interior of my heart was so changed that to name its condition as broken-hearted does not even begin to describe what had happened to me. I feared for a breaking of my mind that would match what had happened to my heart.
In time, I experienced healing I never would have thought possible in the first dark days of loss. Now, I write to help others move towards integrating the present with the past so they will have the hope they need to live in a future that may seem completely marred by loss and brokenness.
If you met me I person and asked for a few personal details, I would say:
I have been married to my high school sweetheart for a bit over a quarter of a century, but I’ve known him for over half a century, so yes, you guessed it, there is a story there. This story began when I was sixteen and he was seventeen. We both ended up marrying other people the first time around. He had three children and I had five when we reconnected and married in our forties.
Some have said I have cast of thousands in my life. That would be true because our marriage meant that we created a very large family. As of today, we have seven living children married to their spouses, nineteen grandchildren, four grandchildren by marriage, a great-grandchild, and another on the way. I don’t expect you, dear reader, to keep up with all the names. It is sometimes almost more than I can keep up with even as I love having a large family with all the chaos, fun, laughter, and many moving parts that come with such a family.
I am a retired English teacher. My husband is a retired high school principal turned Apple store employee. Neither one of us seems to have been successful at retirement. We both are enjoying this third act of life which has brought both of us new careers that we never could have imagined when we first retired from our first careers more than a decade ago.
In the past decade, I have written much on loss, grief, growing through faith, mental health, aging, and family. I also write about hair loss.
As I was grieving over the death of my daughter, my hair began to fall out. This caused another major loss of identity for me. In time, I learned I had an autoimmune condition which had caused me to have a form of scarring alopecia called frontal fibrosing alopecia. This life altering disease also became a topic I chose to make public and write about.
My website is an eclectic place.
I don’t know why you might have stopped by and taken a few moments to read about me, but since you are here, I hope you will join me often. I hope to get to know you better. If you are experiencing loss of any kind, especially if if seems to be life altering loss, I hope you will find there is hope here. I hope you will find comfort. I hope you will find courage to step into your new identity even as it might be an identity you never would have chosen for yourself. I hope you will learn to hold joy and sadness, confusion and clarity, loss and gain, in the same space.
Strands of Silver
Strands of Silver was birthed out of loss. When it seems life is in shreds, or when it seems all of life looks as if it has been splintered beyond repair, I hope you, dear reader, finds this is a place where you can find a path forward to integrate all of life’s events into a new sense of wholeness. When one has suffered grief upon grief, and loss upon loss, when one feels sheared, pruned, cut back, pared down, I hope that in this place you can find there is a way to pick up those strands that seem to be strewn on the floor. Pick up those strands, one by one, I am confident that you will see that there is still beauty to be found in that which may initially have been considered as detrital, that which should have been tossed aside into the ash heap of life’s experiences which are better forgotten, left behind, cast aside.
Strands of Silver is a place where I hope you, the reader, will find connection, rest, peace, and a sense of calm and joy that gives you the strength and the courage to sort through your broken parts of life as you allow the dross to be burned away as you walk through the refiner’s fire.
I hope that in this place, you will learn that these strands of loss and grief can be gathered and woven together to integrate all of life into a work of grace full of silver strands of truth, wisdom, love, restoration and joy.