I have a lot of shampoo for the dead at my house right now.

The shampoo for my elderly dog, Edgar, who died a year ago in January, that targeted hot spots. Plus, his brushes and combs I used to avert mats in his thick fur.

My mother’s shampoo, formulated specially for silver hair, waiting on the edge of the shower since she died in March, after living with my husband, son and me for her last seven years. Her toothpaste too, lavender hand cream and her makeup. The Chloé perfume she thoughtfully stopped wearing after her sense of smell faded because she was worried she would put on too much and not know.

The Head & Shoulders shampoo used by my brother, Steve, until he was so sick from cancer that he couldn’t get out of bed, and his hair had drastically thinned anyhow from chemo. I have his deodorant, too, which he optimistically bought in bulk despite a dire cancer prognosis. He didn’t plan to die, at least not when he did a year ago in March, leaving me with eight Speed Sticks, regular scent. I kept one and gave out the others to his friends at a barbecue in his honor.

Somehow, these intimate personal care items, worthless to anyone but me, have been so much harder to dispose of than things like my brother’s microwave, or his sofa, or the books that my mom hadn’t gotten around to reading before she died.

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Part of it is that I can’t quite believe these people, essential to my life, are gone. My mother was full of unconditional love and loyalty, even after dementia dimmed her memory. She always remembered love. Steve, my only sibling, was six years younger than me. When we were little, he’d come to my room if he had a nightmare. Decades later, during cancer treatment and after it stopped working and we brought him home, I took care of him again. He trusted me with his life. I always figured he’d be sending me off, not the other way around.

Joan Didion wrote in “The Year of Magical Thinking” that after her husband died, “I could not give away the rest of his shoes. I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need his shoes if he was to return. The recognition of the thought by no means eradicated the thought.”

What will my mom shampoo her beautiful hair with? Will my brother need his deodorant?

It’s been a jarring year, full of so much loss and there is so much to sort through: so many possessions, so many memories, so much paperwork, so much grief and, if I’m honest, so much relief to not be caregiving anymore.

I’m the only one left in my family of origin now, my dad having died more than 20 years ago. Sole survivor. Which means that I have all their things.

Which also means, I have them, or rather, their ashes, or cremains, as the funeral home calls them. It’s a real pileup, to tell the truth.

It cremains to be seen

Before my brother died, he said he wanted to be cremated but didn’t care what happened after that. And when he died, I also inherited the cremains of his cat, Sammie, which had sat on his fireplace mantel in his living room. A few months before that, my dog, Edgar, died and was cremated. And then my mom, of course. All of their cremains are currently at my house. My mom is in the closet; my brother and his cat are on my dresser. Edgar, now that I think about it … I’m not sure. I’m positive he’ll turn up.

It’s been a busy year and things got away from me.

We’d planned to scatter our dog’s ashes in places he loved, but then my brother got sicker and needed my time and attention and we never got to it.

We gave some of Steve’s ashes to his friends and plan to inurn the rest in the cemetery where my first son, Phoenix, is buried and where the ashes of my husband and I will be someday. But I just haven’t arranged for it yet. (Possibly the ashes of Steve’s cat too, but I’ll deny it if asked.) And now I also have mom’s cremains, which will eventually be interred in my dad’s grave at the military cemetery where he’s buried.

By the way, we also have the ashes of our cat, who died a few years ago, which created a problem when the vet returned them to us in a nicer wooden box than the keepsake one that contains some of my mother in law’s ashes. We had to upgrade her.

My son suggested that we should just put everyone’s ashes together and turn them into a giant lab-created memorial diamond made from cremains.

‘Reaching out to the dead’

When I was in college, my dad, not given to small talk, called me and immediately upon my answering asked, “Do you want to be cremated or buried?” He liked a deal and had just learned about a funeral co-op where you could sign up and get discounted rates. So, cremation it was, for them and, someday for me.

In time, I’ll take care of it all: the cremains, the beloved possessions.

But for now, I find their most everyday objects — the shampoo, slippers, keys — to be comforting totems, a link back to who they were when they were alive and healthy. For many years after our first son suddenly died of meningitis, I kept his onesie in the bottom of our laundry basket, continuing to be part of the fabric of our everyday lives. I have it still, but now it’s tucked away, under my T-shirts, in a dresser drawer.

My friend and historian Theresa Earenfight recently wrote about going to an archive to research a long-dead photographer and what it felt like to find her belongings. “… When you open a box, or a folder, or a book, you open a world that no longer exists. In a flash, you can reach out to the dead.”

In a way, I think that’s what I’m doing.

In the surrealness of their deaths, it’s proof they were here — real people who once needed these things.

They trusted me to wash their hair at the ends of their lives. We trusted each other with the keys to our houses and cars.

I think I’ll keep it all a little longer.

I’ve inherited my dad’s office supplies three times now.

He was a frugal man who loved a deal. LOVED. So, when David Dahlstrom found one, he stocked up. As he did one day in the 1990s when he came across a sale on bulk paper clips, both regular (#1 Silverette made by ACCO) and jumbo sized (Jumbo Gem by Viking) as well as staples (also ACCO).

His calculations on how many office supplies we’d all need might have worked out, but by the time he died in 2003, paper printouts were becoming passé as the digital age was dawning.

After his death, my mom sorted through the desk of the man she’d loved and found boxes and boxes — far more than she’d use in her lifetime. So, she divided them up, splitting them between herself, my brother and me. My original paper clip inheritance.

My second came last year with the death of my beloved brother, my only sibling. Faced with a whole house of his belongings to empty, I started with his desk, which seemed the most manageable. There, in the upper left drawer, I spotted that same familiar ACCO logo and found three boxes of #1 Silverettes, still full. I took them home with me to show my mom, who lived us.

Then, just a few months ago, she died, peacefully on an early March afternoon. I didn’t touch her room for a while, the grief too fresh. Finally, I decided to sort through one drawer each evening. And, there, in her top desk drawer, next to the pens, greeting cards she’d saved, a notebook with important things to remember written in her familiar handwriting, I came across her remaining boxes of paper clips, plus staples, now mine.

I took them out, held them in my hand and felt the loneliness of being the only one left in my family left to remember — not just the paper clips, but my childhood and how remarkable my father, mom and brother were, each in their own ways. All these things that exist now only in my memory.

But while I’m the only one who remembers, I’m not the end of the line.

My son, Gabriel, was born after my dad died so he never met him, but when he left for college last fall, I gave him one of his grandpa’s boxes of paper clips, just in case he needed them. So, now they are on their third generation. With the new bountiful influx of mom’s and my brother’s paper clips, someday my son may also bequeath them to his children, and possibly his children’s children.

My dad wasn’t one for talking about feelings, except for toward the very end of his life. Instead, he found ways to show it, like teaching me how to change a tire, pulling the car over suddenly at a roadside carnival so we could experience the thrill of a hastily-assembled ferris wheel, giving me books he’d read and loved — and all the office supplies I’d need. Tangible reminders of his legacy of love in a box of paper clips, over and over.

By Linda Dahlstrom Anderson

My mom opened her mouth like a baby bird as I sat next to her bed, feeding her tiny spoonfuls of orange sherbet, hoping that I was doing it with the same care and tenderness with which she’d once fed me when I was her baby.

In these ways, the end of life can be a lot like the beginning, with someone who loves you bathing you, changing you, feeding you, kissing you, tucking you in, waking in the night to check on you and telling you a thousand “I love you”s. Time quietly stands still in these moments and it’s hard to imagine a time before – or a time after.

That’s what has been going on at my house the last few weeks. My mom, Beth Dahlstrom, is 96 so, of course, we knew this was coming, but somehow, now that it’s here, it seems unexpected. She moved in with my husband, Mike, son, Gabriel, and me after she sold her own house nearly seven years ago when she was a still-vital 89-year-old to, in her words, help us. And she did. She made dinners, did laundry, but mostly just loved us. She’d been a nurse for years and had cared for others in a lot of ways for her whole life. That has never stopped, even now.

Her decline was slow over years, nearly imperceptible, first in her body, then her memory. But she still could get herself dressed, sit at the dining room table and read the newspaper or one of her large-print books while enjoying a pastry and coffee. She developed vascular dementia, which meant she has a hard time making new memories, but in the moment she knows who we are. She knows the most important stuff: that she is safe here with her family and cat and dog and we love her and that she loves us.

Until a few weeks ago when she fell in her room, she was still largely herself, loving, giving and wanting to help. “What can I do for you, honey?” was one of the things she said to me most often lately. Nothing was broken or physically injured in her fall, the nurse said, but sometimes with older people, particularly those with dementia, it can mark a turning point.

She didn’t come back from this one. And she won’t. After her showing me unconditional love my whole life, she’s now showing me how to die with grace and love. I’m sitting next to her now as she sleeps, which is what she has been mostly doing for the last three weeks. We’ve been remembering together, or rather I have been remembering for her and telling her stories from her life that I know she loved. Her childhood cat that she used to dress up and push around in her carriage. The hijinks of her older brothers. Graduating from nursing school. Marrying my dad. Her most shining moments were when she became a grandmother. From the moment she met our son Phoenix and then two years later, our Gabriel, they were her favorite people.

When they were babies, Mom would hold them and read them the 1947 Margaret Wise Brown book “Goodnight Moon.” In it, a little bunny tells goodnight to all the things he can see from his bed before going to sleep. Now, I’ve realized, I’m also watching mom do the same thing as she is letting go of this life. Even as I write, I am having a hard time knowing whether to use past or present tense. What is over? What is still to come?

There are so many “lasts” that already slipped by without my noticing. The last time she wore her gray cardigan that has a button of my son’s music project logo. The last time she walked in the sun. The last time she saw Christmas lights. The last time she ate in a restaurant. The last time she went with me to a pet store. Goodnight guinea pigs. Goodnight colorful fish.

The other night I suggested we watch “Murder, She Wrote,” her favorite TV show that we watched together when I was little. After she moved in with us, she and I would sometimes snuggle up on the couch and watch it together again. Now she’s not awake enough to watch past the opening theme, but I put it on anyhow for her to hear. Goodnight Jessica Fletcher. Goodnight girls’ nights together on the couch.

She made my childhood magical. Our house in Anaheim, California, was the one where the neighborhood kids always gathered. She led us in crafts and games and made cookies with us. When it rained, Mom, who grew up in drizzly Bellingham, Washington, always grabbed me and took me outside for a walk in it, even as other parents were scooting their kids inside. (Goodnight walks in the rain together.) She was a friend to all creatures, once rescuing a crow with a broken wing and she and my dad cared for it until it could fly again, likely securing generations of crow good will for my family. (Goodnight crow friends.) When I was 3, she fell and shattered her hip, leading to months in a wheelchair and ending her career as a nurse. She had been the Director of Nursing at Anaheim Memorial Hospital, a role she was proud of and great at. I think it broke her heart a little to have to leave it. She asked me years ago to use a photo of her as a nurse with her obituary.

No longer able to be a nurse, she became a professional cake decorator. As a child, she loved to sketch and paint but a career as an artist was out of the question and she needed to choose something more reliable. She was born during the Depression in a house without running hot water, the youngest of eight (both full and half-siblings). When her papa died when she was 4, money became even scarcer.

As a cake decorator, Mom’s art came to life in icing form. Since it was made to be temporary, lasting only until it was eaten, I now think of it as performance art, something precious to be experienced only in the moment. My little brother, Steve, and I had childhoods filled with outrageously fabulous birthday cakes – castles, carousels, trains, bears sculpted out of icing and more. She continued that tradition with my son, Gabriel. My birthday this year was the day she fell in her bedroom; my son’s 19th birthday was 12 days later. For the first time, she wasn’t aware of either of them. Last year was the final time we’d celebrate. I hadn’t realized it then. Goodnight birthday cakes. Goodnight to my mom singing us “Happy Birthday” in her sweet voice.

She’s had countless visitors over the last few weeks, beloved family andf friends. We’re telling stories to each other and to her, talking to her like she is hearing us because I believe she is. We’ve been sharing her art, both paintings and photos of her cakes. One of her proudest points is that Gabriel is an artist, taking after her.

Over the last days, people have been telling her goodbye and thanking her. She’s beloved. And the love she gives knows no bounds. She’s always tried to see the good in people and she usually found it. Family, to her, has never just been who she’s related to – a lesson she taught me. When my brother was a teenager, some of his friends had difficult home lives, but she provided a sanctuary. Some even moved in with her, my dad and brother when I was in college. In recent weeks they’ve been texting, decades later. One, who told me he always felt that Mom was God’s love in action, is coming to see mom tomorrow night.

She has one living grandchild, but she’s been Grandma Beth to many. Goodnight friends. Goodnight family.

But even as people are saying goodbye, she also has been getting other, unexpected, visits from those she has loved who are long dead. The other day, she thought she was at the home of her best friend, Isabel. The two of them were nurses together back in the 1960s in California and remained fast friends until Isabel died several years ago. Mom was so bereft by her death, and that of two other friends in close succession that summer, that she started on antidepressants for the first time in her life. But now Isabel is back and so are some of the others she loved dearly, including her cats. A lifelong cat lover, Mom recently started talking about our three cats. In reality, we only have one. Not long ago, she also told me about a little boy who had cuddled her in bed. I suspect it might be my first son, Phoenix, who died long ago. Mom also told me that she’s going to be picking apples with her mother soon. I believe she is. The veil between here and there is very thin, I believe, and in times like this — the in-between — it’s more permeable.

My mom has a lot of people on the other side. At 96, she’s lost so many – her husband, most of her friends, all her siblings and their spouses, all of my dad’s siblings except for my beloved Aunt Mary, his sister. Mom and Aunt Mary, friends for 70 years, used to go on trips together after their husbands died. For years, she has been one of mom’s anchors, one of the last witnesses to my mom’s whole adult life. Goodnight suitcases. Goodnight road trips.

Mom has seen countless friends buried and also her grandson, Phoenix. After he died, my husband and I stayed with her for a few weeks, away from the memories in our own house. I’d wake early in the morning while Mike was still sleeping and crawl into bed with her, as I had done as a child after a nightmare. She’d stroke my head, just as she did when I was little. Even in the most painful of her own losses, she looked for ways to reach beyond herself. She taught me to try and take the pain and see if it was possible to use it for something good.

A few days ago, I think she had what hospice nurses call “a rally,” an unexpected surge of energy that people sometimes get shortly before death. She was awake more than she had been in weeks and kept saying it was time to get up. So, my husband and I lifted her tiny body into her wheelchair. I pushed her through the kitchen where she cooked us so many meals (Goodnight taco pie) and into the living room where she used sit and read her books or fold clothes. (Goodnight laundry.) Then I brought her to the dining room table for coffee, a pastry and the newspaper, as used to be her daily routine. This time, I fed her bird-sized bites on a fork and she took sips of coffee through a straw from a cup too heavy for her to hold. Before I took her back to bed, we stopped at the front door so she could breathe the night air once more and see the stars. “It’s cold,” she said. Goodnight moon. I thought to myself. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

I don’t know when our final goodbye will be. A few times already, I’ve walked into her bedroom and her breath was imperceptible and I was afraid she’d gone. But then I kiss her on her soft cheek and tell her I love her and she’ll rouse and say, “I love you, honey” and kiss me back, the sweetest love I have ever felt. Last night I was holding her hand and she opened her eyes and asked me if I wanted to crawl into bed with her. I did. She put her arm around my back as I curled my face into her neck, trying to not let her feel the wetness of my tears. Was that the last time?

Years ago, I was at an event for work and someone asked who our heroes were. Without even thinking, I named mom, the best woman I have ever known. She is the first person I loved and she has loved me fiercely, fully and unconditionally my whole life, always in my corner. (She is still mad at a college boyfriend who did me wrong.) I got to be loved by her and learn from her my whole life. It’s hard to ask for more than that. But I do want more. I feel a little afraid knowing that soon I’ll step back out into a world without her, uncharted territory. Like her, I will be the last in my family of origin. My dad died years ago and my brother died of cancer a year ago, something Mom does not remember, one of the few gifts of dementia.

I’ll still have the memory of her love, after she’s gone, and that has to be enough. For now, we have this moment, suspended in time, between life and death, where I’m learning my last lesson from her – how to let go.

Writer’s note: Mom died the afternoon of March 2, 2026, shortly after her hospice team had gathered for a “Nightingale Ceremony,” where she was honored for her work as a nurse and was released from her duty. She peacefully took her last breaths while we shared stories about her and told her how much we loved her. There was a full moon that night.

I never wanted the way my son died to overshadow his life. He’d be 21 now if he’d lived. I wish I could tell you what he’s passionate about, or how he’s doing in college, or what he wants to add to this world – all things I get to know about his brother, who was born after he died.

But the truth is, I have no idea what Phoenix’s story would be today. That’s quite a thing for a mother to say about the child she was once one with, the child who was her world for a brief, shining time.

Phoenix, our firstborn, died of meningococcal disease when he was 7 months old, more than 20 years ago. For a long time, I tried to make sense of it, retracing all the things I’d done to see if I could make them lead to a different world where he could have lived. After all this time, the one thing I know could have saved him was a vaccine that would have prevented him being infected.

At the time he died, there wasn’t one available in the United States – not until later, after it was too late for him. I still remember how my knees went weak and I grabbed the kitchen counter to steady myself the afternoon I read that one was being tested and was close. I was devastated that it hadn’t come in time for my son, but so grateful that other families wouldn’t have to go through what we had. Vaccines had eradicated so many diseases, and finally, maybe meningococcal disease, too.

And now … now we have gone backward in time with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to strike some critical vaccines, including those for meningitis, from the list of recommended vaccines for children.

I used to think that people who were opposed to vaccines simply didn’t remember a time before so many deadly diseases had been eradicated. Maybe people didn’t have a lived memory of, say, measles and polio anymore, and if they did, they’d understand vaccines’ importance. I don’t think that anymore. Over the years, vaccines seem to have become less a tool to save lives and more a politically divisive flashpoint with science and statistics ignored.

Phoenix isn’t a symbol; he was a real little boy who is gone. But left behind is his story, and so I’d like to tell it one more time. I know it won’t override any of the anti-vaccine rhetoric, but maybe it can sit alongside it, evidence of the difference between having a vaccine and not. Life and death.

Until the day Phoenix died, he’d never been sick. Not even a cold. He was snuggly and sweet with an easy laugh. How his blue eyes sparkled when I’d put him on a baby swing. He looked at people like he really, really saw them. I got the feeling somehow we’d known each other before. A friend told me that Phoenix was the happiest person he’d ever met. I loved seeing his delight in the new things he discovered – dogs, mashed bananas, books, rain. He had an openness to life, like he was always waiting to see what was next.

But on July 7, 2005, I woke in the pre-dawn hours to him making a sound I hadn’t heard before – it was almost like he was too tired to cry. My husband and I panicked and we took him to the ER. There, he was diagnosed with the flu and we were sent home. I remember telling a neighbor who saw us getting out of the car in front of our house how relieved I was that it wasn’t something more serious. But a few hours later, Phoenix seemed to me more lethargic and I called his pediatrician to see if she could look at him. I expected to be reassured that I was just being a nervous, first-time mom.

In her office, she lifted his shirt and we saw something that hadn’t been there earlier – a mottled rash. She knew. It was a telltale sign for meningitis. She ran with us, out of her office, across the skybridge connecting to the same hospital we’d been at earlier and down the elevator back to the emergency room.

The next few hours were a blur and they are agony to revisit, although I have in my dreams many times. Late that afternoon, his heart stopped. My husband and I took turns holding his hand and I sang to him while doctors tried to bring him back with CPR. He died less than 12 hours after his first symptom.

These are the facts of his death, which I have learned to recount over time. But what it felt like was falling into an abyss of despair where there is no air and no hope and nothing makes sense anymore. For months after he died, I slept with his clothes, had panic attacks and couldn’t start my day unless I picked out what he would have worn that day if he were still alive. Grief has no logic and nothing in the universe feels right when one day, you are a mother cuddling your child and giving him a bath, and the next you are tucking notes into his clothes so the people in the morgue handling his body will know how special and loved he was. It was a long time before I was able to return to the light.

Our youngest son, born a year and a half after Phoenix died, helped bring my husband and I back. Like his brother, he was full of joy. His first word was “Wow”, and he filled my world with wonder, but I battled my terror that something might happen to him too.

I remember the day that he was able to get the vaccine for meningitis that came too late for Phoenix. Watching him get that shot, I knew that the thing that had killed Phoenix would never be able to take him now. It felt almost sacred. Just one injection to save a life — so impossibly simple. And it’s the same for the other vaccines that were removed from the recommended list, for flu, hepatitis, RSV, rotavirus and others.

I know what I have missed over the years since my Phoenix died. I have seen the children in Phoenix’s baby group grow up. And I’ve seen it through my youngest son’s beautiful life. He’s grown up and is in college now and when I see him, I can kiss his cheek, breathe in the smell of his neck, put my head on his shoulder when we watch a movie and feel his hair. I don’t take any of it for granted. He’s an incredible, compassionate man with his own ideas and passions who loves music, creates beautiful art and tries to make the world better. He lights up my world and introduces me to new things. He’s big and strong and watches out for me, always carrying my bags and making sure he’s right next to me if we are out at night. When he was younger, I would sometimes imagine a parallel universe where his big brother was there with him, watching out for him. A world where ours is a family of four, not three. Sometimes I still think about that, but I no longer know how to imagine Phoenix.

The last direct physical tie I have of him is a snippet of his hair, cut by a nurse as I held him in the hours after he died. It’s in a tiny plastic bag, nestled in a box alongside his footprint and handprint taken at the hospital and a card signed by the doctors and nurses there. On rare occasions, I let myself open the bag, carefully so I don’t lose any, slip my finger in and let myself feel his hair again and remember the days when I’d press my face against his sweet head.

As I’m trying to avoid despairing about decisions being made at the government level right now, I’m sitting with those and other memories. He was here for a brief, shining time. And what I can do is share his story.

Hello. I’m new here – a beginner again, now on Substack. When I was little, I wanted to be able to read and write so much that my mom tells me I came home from kindergarten my first day crying because I hadn’t learned to do it that day. I think I must have sensed what it would come to mean to me.

I’ve been making a living with words for most of my career, telling other people’s stories and some of my own. I’ve loved all of it. (Well, mostly all of it.) I spent decades as a journalist, everywhere from small newspapers to major news outlets, mostly focusing on health and medicine.

Over the years, I’ve loved a lot — and I’ve lost a lot, including my son, my brother, my father and friends. If we get to live long enough, we all lose someone. Some losses, though, feel impossible to survive, and yet, the body goes on, even when the heart doesn’t want to. In the weeks after my son died, I asked a woman who had lost a child years before, how long the blackness and despair lasted for her. She told me that she wasn’t sure, only that she didn’t feel that way anymore. And now, I don’t either.

My friend JoNel once told me that she thinks I’m interested in the portals of life - the comings and goings. I think she’s right. About 15 years ago I became a doula, something I only do once or twice a year, and I think she’s right. It’s a sacred space when a new being arrives on this planet — and the same sacredness is pervasive when someone leaves. I used to think that maybe something in me would shift when I’d attended as many births as I’d been present at the deaths of people I loved, but I realized that it all just feels like part of the same flow.

Izak Dinesen, best known for writing “Out of Africa” once said, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

So, maybe by way of introducing this Substack, I’ve actually started on where this will take us. Let’s see.