Author: Rose Dowd Gallogly

I had been watching Grey’s Anatomy for a few months before that day.  I never thought it was particularly good, but it had a perfect combination of pandemic TV show qualities: endless, engrossing, and even more endless. Some part of me appreciated that it was a medical show too, even if I didn’t assume its… Continue reading at least (and other first anniversary notes)

Written for the April 2022 issue of Quest Monthly. – A phrase landed in me during the week that my mother was dying, as I grasped at any words I could find to make sense of the enormous shift in front of me.  The shape of every memory is changing.  I was seeing with painful… Continue reading The Shape of Memory

There is such deep strangeness to my life, so much immediacy and closeness with grief in every detail, in every day. I work for my mother’s church. I work for my mother’s church. I’m part of the ministry staff of the sweet, complicated little congregation that she raised all of us in. I craft and… Continue reading samhain (learning to hold ancestors close)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the day I was born, trying to imagine what it was like for you.  It was brutally hot — that’s the one detail you always remembered most clearly. Deep July heat with heavy, humid air, so different from the rainy cool heaviness we’ve had most of this month.  I… Continue reading twenty-seven

Written for the June 2021 issue of Quest Monthly. – As I write this, I’m about two months into the most significant and all encompassing grief journey of my life. My beloved mother passed away at the beginning of April — a fact that still feels completely impossible, no matter how many times I share… Continue reading On Grief & Embodiment

On Mom’s 65th birthday, June 9 2021 How great it would be to stay in this half-dreaming morning state just a bit longer, anything to stop this day from actually starting. It’s just a day, right? I’ve gotten through all the other days so far, I can’t build this up too much. It’s just a… Continue reading Notes from our first birthday without her

It was the week that George Floyd was killed, a year ago today.  The world had already started to erupt around us. The world that I cared about most was erupting, anyway — the world of movement and organizing and dreams of abolitionist futures. It was beginning to look like a moment of the whirlwind… Continue reading the tower / things fall apart

I woke early last Friday morning. I wake up early most mornings these days; my mind starts turning on around 6 or 7 every morning, no matter how tired my grieving body feels. But on that particular day I woke early and felt energy in my body, actual energy.  I felt I needed to spend… Continue reading On presence, fear & spirit

I realize that’s true, that I’m feeling that specific pain for that reason — and then I remind myself that I believe that a form of consciousness exists after death, and that ancestors still know us and exist alongside us, just in a form that’s pretty beyond my understanding. I remind myself that I’ve believed… Continue reading It’s so painful to make new memories without Mom.

“May her memory be a blessing.” I thought I understood that phrase before but wow, did I ever underestimate its meaning.  Her memory, the richness of her life and relationships and authentic kindness, warmth, wisdom — everything about remembering her fills me with love. Even the parts of her I struggled with in life (they… Continue reading The things people say, part 2