February 28, 2026

Jeweled Beads of Wisdom

Posted by Mara Jevera Fulmer under beginnings, creative writing, Family, growth, love, magic, Photos, poetry, Travel, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Dawn view from the mountainside above San Martin de los Piramides, Mexico, 2006. Photo by author.

Each place is a step along the winding path that has brought me here to this hovel in the countryside, a widow twice over, the mother of grown children, step mother to those who would still have me after the last husband passed away. And grandmother to those I can still hug in person or across the miles through the miracle of FaceTime.

Each place still hangs with me, its whispering wisdom, magic, and spirit, for me to carry to the next stop along my way, though that path is still left to be charted.

I feel the intensity of my grandmother’s journey from Russia through Europe, to Cuba, waiting to get into the US, mourning her little’s brother’s death during their travels with her mother, yet trying to find her own identity as a youth in a foreign land, only to later learn their father was gone, too.

They betray the loss… of old ways, of deep knowledge.
Such Olmec wisdom of ancestors on full display,
yet we still think we’re so smart.

I feel the wind against my cheek on a cool Mexican morning, sunrise over the mountainside at 10,000 feet, shadowing my back, letting sun rays drift across the pyramids below. They betray the loss… of old ways, of deep knowledge. Such Olmec wisdom of ancestors on full display, yet we still think we’re so smart.

I feel the salt spray on my face as the boat takes the waves through the channel in the Fiji islands, the ripples and splashes concealing the beautiful corals and tropical fish that dance and sway in the currents below. I join their steely giant cohabitant as it slowly tilts its hammerhead eyes towards me. I let myself sink to the sandy bottom.

I feel the sun’s warmth on my cheeks on a cool Michigan fall day, the flickering lights making colorful autumn leaves shine like jewels against the stark blue skies, belying the hints of winter to come. The old post and beam workshop behind me is wrapped in grapevines, providing shade to my printing presses inside, awaiting my touch to create anew.

I carry all of these feels with me, their memories, the learned wisdom, worn around my heart like jeweled beads of wisdom. I carry it all, sharing with willing souls, and learning from beloved travelers who I meet along the way, as I remake this home anew.

– Mara Jevera Fulmer, February 10, 2026

Backyard view, Fall sunset in Michigan. Photo by author.

The above prose was expanded from a short writing exercise during a six-week workshop offered by @LauraLentzWriter and her Literati Academy. The writers participating in this series are exploring their way through grief and the hero’s journey.

 

February 20, 2026

The angel and the Columbia

Posted by Mara Jevera Fulmer under beginnings, grief, growth, love, magic, Photos, surviving, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Heavy leather belts begin to turn the wheels of the giant Columbia oscillating sander. Photo by author.

He was bobbing around laughing and smiling, his broad chested yet smallish stature accentuated by the 23,000 lbs of 19th century iron machinery that he was tweaking here and there to coax it back to life. It came from an era when the railroad industry was at its height, three drums of varying sandpaper oscillating to prepare the wood, and a fourth drum covered in brushes to clean it off and ready to use.

I sat there watching him, though surreptitiously as I was supposed to be doing my homework for my doctoral program. My books and iPad were perched upon the hand-built wooden table saw that the original owner of this post & beam furniture factory had built for himself complete with little victorian flourishes of details in the handles and guards.

But I just couldn’t help trying to keep track of my new beau Steve’s efforts as he climbed up on top of the giant Columbia sanding machine. Then he would hop down again to check the webbing of more large leather belts and their matching steel pulleys that would have made the machine turn its wheels back in the days of steam power.

I remembered when my husband Keith and I first bought this property, not even two years before. We bought it at first sight, a 20th Century post and beam building filled with many pieces of 19th and early 20th century heavy machinery all used to make furniture. An accomplished woodworker himself, Keith had planned to make it all his. Alas, the stars were aligned differently and he passed away from a very aggressive cancer barely a year after we purchased it leaving me, his widow, to sort out what to do with it all.

And then the stars sent Steve. I think KEITH sent Steve, perhaps after being horrified at my poor attempts to try and sell some of the tools I knew I would never use, but that had left me grifted by his own friend. Steve would become my protector. But perhaps in this case it was not that he had fallen in love only with me, I wondered sometimes. It was this place, where it seemed that many ghosts had congregated to protect the legacy of this old maker space.

I looked up and there was Steve, dancing around the machine grinning from ear to ear.

As I tried to go back to my homework on my table-saw desk, I heard the roar and rattle as the beast came to life. Keith had tried to do this before, but the belts were too loose and fell off within seconds. He never had the chance to go back and try again before his illness had progressed too far.

I looked up and there was Steve, dancing around the machine grinning from ear to ear. As I watched this elfish man jump around this iron giant, he went to one end of the machine where large wood panels would come out, fully sanded and brushed off, ready to use for railroad cars. I snapped a picture of him with the light behind him.

The ghosts that haunt me now. Photo by author.

Later that day I would look again at this photo only to catch my breath. There it was, a ghostly shadow of a slim man leaning over just behind Steve. Keith was there, cheering for the success of this rebirth of this giant, perhaps the last operational Columbia belt-driven panel sander left in the country I’d discovered after further research. I took this rebirthing as a sign that I should never take for granted that I am ever alone on this path. And to accept that my angels are never very far from me, despite the temptation to succumb to sadness. That death of my loved one is not an ending. But a new beginning.

– Mara Jevera Fulmer, February 18, 2026

The “K” at the end of the line. Photo by author.

The above prose was expanded from a 13-minute writing exercise during a six-week workshop offered by @LauraLentzWriter and her Literati Academy. The writers participating in this series are exploring their way through grief and the hero’s journey.

 

January 23, 2026

Before & After

Posted by Mara Jevera Fulmer under beginnings, death, friendship, grief, love, marriage, mourning, surviving, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Happy times. Me and Steven were wandering the wineries of the Mission Peninsula in Traverse City. June 2019

Before grief, I spoke the language of we. What were we doing today? Even if we were working separately our days rotated around each other like two stars in synchronous orbits, each shining our light upon the other with love and kindness. 

Before grief, I still grieved for my first love. But you stepped into my life, two roses in hand, with a smile so bright it still makes me laugh when I think of it… Memories can be both healing and hurtful in their teasing. But I’d rather the smile, than the tears.

It was always like that with us, my sesame chicken to your homey meatloaf. The doctor and the hillbilly, the designer and the maker. We were in sync in this third chapter of our lives and I was looking forward to a long one together. But it wasn’t meant to be, I guess. The dogs sleeping on your side of the bed has a way of reminding me of that.

So now I speak of possibilities, though I am charting a new path without a roadmap to guide me. No late night nudges to ask you “Is this possible?” And for you to answer me “of course it is!” I miss that. But grief can’t take away my dreams, not completely anyway. They have shifted, adapted, and are still remolding themselves.

[A]fter grief, I’m learning to believe in myself again.

I’ve been through this before. And I know that it can only lead to something bigger than myself. That my life is not just a big empty house in a forest filled with darkness.

After grief, I’m learning anew. You always knew that I was a lifelong learner. Back to school again and again and again. But now it’s not what I know or who I love that matters. It’s what I believe. And after grief, I’m learning to believe in myself again. To apply the lessons of the before-times to a party of one with room to invite fellow believers.

That’s harder than it sounds. But I’m working on it.

The above prose was written as part of a 13-minute writing exercise during a six-week workshop offered by @LauraLentzWriter and her Literati Academy. The writers participating in this series are exploring their way through grief and the hero’s journey.

 

July 30, 2018

Full Moon Shining

Posted by Mara Jevera Fulmer under Family, grief, love, marriage, Photos, surviving, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Friday, 7/27/18

Woke up at 4:52 am to a blazing light shining upon me. It was a huge full moon low on the horizon so that its light reached inside my bedroom. I smiled and said Happy 60th Birthday, Keith! We miss you here on this life’s plane. Hope you’re enjoying all our shenanigans from your view on the other side. ❤️

Keith taking his solo pilot flight test, upstate NY. Instructor decided we should all go to dinner in Keene, NH.

Postscript: When I awoke later in the morning daylight, I looked out the window and saw the trees and wondered how I could have seen the moon so clearly earlier. And yet, there it had been! When he passed, it was a huge blue moon (a second full moon in the month) and I always associate the strong light of the full moon as his embrace from beyond.

 

January 28, 2018

Are you done grieving?

Posted by Mara Jevera Fulmer under beginnings, death, Family, grief, love, marriage, mourning | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Bedroom in new home

“Are you done grieving?” It wasn’t a question for me. It was asked of my father by a recent friend. She asked my dad as they shared lunch and talked about the new house we’ve been building and what she’d seen.

Later, Dad shared the question with me and it got me thinking about it. I answered him quickly at first: “Does anyone ever stop grieving?”

He mentioned his reaction to hearing the song: “You’ll never walk alone” from Carousel. It had been a favorite of my mother’s. And just a week before she died, the last time we heard her say anything, she sang some of it when a visitor – a complete stranger to my mother – asked her in her slumber if she had ever heard the song. As the visitor began to sing the first few words, my mother began to sing with her.

When it came on the radio, out of the blue, as he got to an intersection he began to cry. Just like that. No warning. It just hit him, now 18 months later. Does anyone ever stop grieving? No, I said to dad. We just begin to change the way we respond to the memories, the triggers. We get to the point where we can smile and sigh, rather than cry. It can take awhile.

We just begin to change the way we respond to the memories, the triggers. We get to the point where we can smile and sigh, rather than cry. It can take awhile.

Even now, for me, five and a half years after Keith passed, there are times when that inevitable moment stops my breath. A song, a number, a phrase, a space, a memory… and I have to pause for a moment, take it in, reflect, and consider the possibility – is this a message?Pay attention, I tell myself. He’s still there, just on the other side of the veil. He’s still with you as real as the bearded little man laying beside me now. There are times when I still feel his touch, a gentle one on the shoulder, a soft caress to the cheek as if a kiss made of air.

Sunset over snowy field and woodsThe triggers still come, a song I hadn’t heard in awhile played recently and I had to stop and listen and nod. “I will wait, I will wait for you…” sang Mumford & Sons. The song had just been released the last summer Keith was alive. I had put it on the playlist that became the soundtrack of the summer. “You can’t let me down now” sang Bonnie Raitt in another soulful tune that filled me with guilt and sadness for not having saved Keith from the pain he endured. Then there was “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, a song that came out the year Keith and I were able to see them play live in concert.

These tunes and several others cause the air to slip out from my lungs momentarily, my heart to tighten in my chest. The difference now is that they don’t make me cry like they once did. The tightness lets go quicker and a soft smile slowly curves the corners of my mouth and I breath again, lovingly touched by the soul of my deepest connection in the spirit world.

There are times when I may also feel a bit irrational, where anxiety steps up and clenches my nerves tightly. Last fall I had been asked about going to a conference this winter. It was one that I had attended in March 2012 and co-presented with Ferris doctoral students along with the then president of the college where I work. It was in Philadelphia and I’d wanted Keith to join me but he couldn’t. He hadn’t been feeling all that well and felt the pressure of some work he needed to do. I wasn’t happy about his not feeling well, this uncured bronchitis or whatever it was. But he clearly didn’t have the energy to travel so I backed off. The conference, however, has somehow been cast in my mind as the “beginning of the end” for Keith.

So it was with a sudden attack of anxiety that I couldn’t immediately bring myself to register for this event when asked last October. Steven had had a health scare around the same time and I had a sudden feeling of deja vu, a path I didn’t want to travel twice in six years. Fortunately for Steven, the potential for liver problems was caught early enough and has led to him cutting way back on his alcohol intake and it has made a noticeable difference.

I had a sudden feeling of deja vu, a path I didn’t want to travel twice in six years.

Still, though the moment had passed, the anxiety over the association between this conference and losing a husband remained. Irrational, yes. But real enough that I put it off while still watching the deadline for the early bird registration. So when the moment came this week in a meeting with the VP to discuss conference travel, I was relieved when she supported my attending a different conference, one that would take place in Austin, Texas at the end of May. I would plan to take Steven so he could visit with his son, and I’d lead a contingent of faculty to the conference. It looked like something I could sincerely enjoy doing. The anxiety slipped away and replaced by a sense of giddy relief.

But then Dad mentioned the question asked by his lady friend: “Are you done grieving?” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The answer is: No. But life still moves forward and we must go with it, or risk losing the opportunity to live the life we’ve been blessed with to the fullest.

 

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