Facing the yawning abyss of solitude in the fall of my life It was a beautiful fall day in early October, 2023, when Anne and I were still living in Dijon, France. We were heading for Mâcon for a day trip, on a local train destined for Lyon. The train was an old..
The unrelenting brutality of grief and the pervasive pall of mourning The verse that emerges in these clumsy attempts at Haiga creation is often bleak, reflecting the unrelenting brutality of grief and the pervasive pall of mourning. Haiga is a Japanese concept describing a refined visual art of combining brush painting, Haiku,and calligraphy. A traditional..
Unsafe at any speed revisited I’m a horrible driver; I’ve always been a horrible driver. This deficiency is in my DNA: behind the proverbial wheel, my father was unsafe at any speed and my mother was beyond a shadow of a doubt the worst driver in history. (Various friends and relatives wanted to sue the..
Escaping the rough by choosing the right club In 1964, when I was 12 years old, our family moved from Georgetown to London Ontario. This permanent change of scene came as a devastating blow, complete with the typical leaving behind of school and friends, entailing the requisite adjustment to a new, bigger city culture. In..
Unhappy Campers Revisited For many more pictures, please click here: https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/unhappy-campers/ It was the summer of 1980. Anne and I were spending our holidays in Vancouver with her family. We were child free. When fall approached, we settled on a novel way to return to our home in Quebec City, opting..
Glioblastoma Awareness Day: July 15, 2026 Today is Glioblastoma Awareness Day intended to raise awareness of glioblastoma (GBM), one of the most complex, deadly, and treatment-resistant cancers. As many of you know, I lost my sweet, courageous partner, Anne Schlenker McBryde, to this scourge on May 3, 2026, after a year-long battle with the..
Fête nationale française le 14 juillet 2026 : Vive la Révolution ! Retour sur la prise de notre Bastille en 2023… et aujourd’hui Bastille Day, July 14, 2026: Vive la Révolution! Looking back on the storming of our Bastille in 2023…and today The English version of this very short sketch immediately follows the French. ..
We are just grains of sand in the vast cosmic ocean One key element that makes death so weird and disconcerting is that we are but dust in the wind, quickly blown away and forgotten, yet when we inevitably leave this veil of tears, a unique sensory, psychological, and intellectual universe, an entire history in..
Dealing with the bureaucracy of death: A special kind of hell There is a special kind of hell in losing someone you love and then, before grief has even had room to breathe, being forced to become fluent in the cold machinery of death administration: forms, affidavits, certificates, tax rules, court language, bank demands, and..
Ephemeral Mist: We Exist Then Disappear Haiga is a Japanese concept describing a refined visual art of combining brush painting, Haiku (or sometimes Tanka, as here), and calligraphy. A traditional Haiga requires all three of these elements. Like the poetic form it accompanies, Haiga is based on simple, yet often what one hopes are profound,..