Just a thought… You can start anew at any given moment. Life is just the passage of time and it’s up to you to pass it as you please. [Charlotte Eriksson]

Today is a day for new beginnings, a significant celebration and even a happy ending.

As you may have seen on Facebook on Sunday, a jewel in our lives, the wonderful Mira Frankl, marked yet another big birthday, and turned 99. For us, SHE is the Great One! We love this woman with all our hearts and will always be grateful that she came into our lives through volunteering.

Now we are the best of friends; she calls Rob and me “her kids” and we count our blessings every hour we spend together. Sometimes it’s walking through Sidney, as she and I did yesterday, but most often it’s at her apartment, the dogs on the couch next to her, as she talks, laughs and even softly cries, discussing not just her own, but our days and lives.

She has so much love in that tired heart of hers, so much wisdom. What a woman; what a life! I’d wish her a longer one, but she’s ready to go peacefully to her rest and we hope for her that very same thing. To wish otherwise would be selfish, but we’ll never be ready for her to go.

Letting go of someone or something you love is, as anyone who’s done it knows, never easy. So after months of consideration, it’s time for me to drift away from doing so many new sleep stories and bringing them out every two weeks. I’ll have a new one tonight, but that may be it for a while.

There will always be well over 100 tales to listen to for free (thanks to sponsors enVyPillow.com and SierraSil.com) and they’ll be staying put. My challenge will be spreading the net (or duvet) to bring in more listeners to the gently-told stories of love, endurance, kindness and, yes, princesses. I’ll find a way to do that and to grow our Drift with Erin Davis sleep stories audience, but I think that this one-woman initiative is in need of a rest. (My fingers just typed “reset” and that may have been a better word.)

I just talked to Rob who said – because he’s my in-house therapist – “Remember what you say: don’t agree to something when you’re in a good mood, or turn down something when you’re not.” SO with that in mind, I’ll just say I’m stepping away for now and will create again when the inspiration hits.

So that’s one bit of news. The other is that in the past few days I put out my first and second Not a Mourning Person grief brief videos. There will be no particular order in which to watch these two-minute segments on YouTube; I’ll drop them when I feel I (or you) have something that needs to be said. I’ll keep shooting and putting out these videos and am counting on those of us in the grief conversation to add to it with your questions and observations. The emails will need to be short, as are the videos (I realize we live in a TL;DR – too long, didn’t read – universe).

It’s time to try something new. I appreciate the many suggestions I received for a title, but as you see, I chose Not a Mourning Person as a play on words and my mindset. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t talk about grief in our day-to-day lives!

So let’s raise a coffee cup to new beginnings (like grandbaby Jane’s first day of school, and Colin’s start of grade five in a new one), gentle endings and celebrations of life and the gifts we find in the every-day.

Happy New Year (the way Labour Day always makes me feel) and if you’re a former teacher, I really hope your happy dance is loud and lively!