Life with Words
Welcome!
If you are new to my site, you might be curious about what is here:
I've written Displaced Persons (Amazon, paperback and Kindle formats), about my Latvian family, and about a woman deported to Siberia from her home in Latvia, and about my own hard time after a 20-year marriage ended. Voluntarily or under duress, all of us came to know displacement. Each of us became separated from the person we thought we were.
My mother's family fled from Russian invasion in 1944. My father's family remained trapped in Riga, behind the Iron Curtain. Elza Fridlandere, a teacher in Jelgava, Latvia, was taken from her home at gunpoint in the night and put to work as slave labour by the Kara Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. The end of my marriage pitched me out of community and into a dwindling existence with dwindling resources. I chose a drastic step, removing myself from all I loved in the belief I knew how to re-invent myself. It did not go as expected.
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My own hard time was almost banal - who doesn't know a person who's been divorced? - yet I broke the easiest, and Elza, the one whose experience of displacement was the most brutal, became my life raft. Family history on both sides led me towards understanding that displacement is a universal story, and that how, and whether, we adapt is as individual as fingerprints.
On this site, in addition to stories associated with the writing of Displaced Persons, there are diversions into commentary on ageing (I'm in my 70's) and life in Cornwall, where I now live. Please dip in now and then, and I'd be happy to hear from you.
I write about grief: how we approach the certain death of someone we love; how we bury them; how we remember them; how we go on. By 'we' of course I mean 'me', for your experience will not be the same as mine, though it's likely each of us will face exactly the same painful circumstances at some point in our lives.
This is my journey of grief, and it is everyone's.