Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Guys (men and women) you have to celebrate this holiday. In some way. Any way. Big. Small. A way that will let the person you love know you love him or her. Old or young, it matters. It matters for a lot of reasons. The surface one is that it's because our culture celebrates this holiday and all around each of us is this huge message of SHOW YOUR LOVE. We may say we don't buy into it, or shun "Hallmark" holidays but I am going to call BS on that. Nobody is that cool. Nobody never needs someone to show their love. Nobody ever learns to live perfectly well without love. We all need to feel loved, in some way. And, on special days, like today, we like to see it in some special way. I say this as someone who used to think she was too cool, too strong, too modern to need flowery hearts and fake holiday sentiment. Until I finally admitted I did, said so, and improved my marriage. When we got married, we had an emotional "pre-nup" in which he made me swear to never...

A painting from Hope Lodge, NYC, taken during a tour with our ACS BAC group, which included Susan. A painting we admired . When you are grieving, I told my friend Devra as we talked last night---the last day of our friend Susan's life--when you are grieving, I think you are insane, a little. Devra explained to me that in Judaism the literal translation for grief is "out of your mind," and you must give space to grievers to be out of their minds. That’s right. In the face of loss, people deserve space to be out of their minds. And they will get back in their minds in their own time, not when people are tired of their grief and ready for them to move on. We are unfair to grief, I think, treating it as an enemy or a disease to be fought. We do not succumb to grief. We do not lose to grief. We engage grief. It gives us the time our hearts need for us to be out of our minds. Right now I am a little out of my mind. A lovely, amazing, inspirational woman is finished. Her body s...

"Let's be friends forever -- LYLAS!" has morphed into "Let's be BFFs!" since I was a girl, but the meaning is still the same: young, open hearts feel a swell of emotional connection and want to extend that warm and lovely sense. Forever, though, is a really different concept from person to person. My girls take it pretty literally, and do sincerely mean it. I understand this; it's my way too. I don't understand it as a fleeting metaphor. When my girls encounter this, their hearts break and they sob in my arms, "Why does she not want to be my friend any more?" For now, it is their buddies. In a few years, though, I know it will be something more. How can you explain to the broken-hearted that one doesn't love more or less but that some others have more of a plural approach to love and friendship, in counter to their more singular approach? You hug them, bless their lovely loyal hearts, and help piece back together a heart hopefully left ...

Last night we had storms come through and were under a tornado watch until three a.m. Because two tornadoes did touch down just south of us, and still antsy from the recent tragedies north of us in Tennessee, we decided to sleep with the radio on in case they ran the siren alert through the emergency broadcast system. Used to silence, so to speak, at night, the unusual noise and changes from one symphony to another would periodically trigger my brain to sit up and sniff like a curious dog. These brief moments of wakefulness would, I knew, lead me to wake with a fatigue restless night's sleep headache, but also gave me uninterrupted time to think---which in my case means storytell. So I decided to write up the top two stories from the last few days. Today, a tale of romance and friendship...tomorrow a tale of something lost and something found, with humor and a twist. What's Love Thursday morning---Valentine's Day---we came downstairs long after my husband had already left f...