Self-Censorship

May 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

You’d think that someone who says she writes for herself would write whatever she wants, and that would be true if I saved the writing for myself alone as I did with the journal I kept after Jeff died. Once a piece is written, however, and I go to post it, things change. Suddenly, it’s not just for me but for anyone who wants to take a peek into my life and thoughts and emotions.

For example, I tend to stay away from anything controversial, and if by chance I happen to mention something that could be construed as political, I edit it out because it’s just not worth the backlash. So perhaps it’s not self-censorship so much as it is simply editing to make a more universally accepted piece. Or do I mean peace?

Either way, I do sometimes second guess what I write, not just when it involves world affairs, but also when it involves people in my life, especially if I know they read this blog. In fact, I’m sitting here right now debating about whether or not I should mention something that recently happened. (Apparently, I decided to go ahead with the article, because here I am.)

A few days ago, I accompanied a friend to an appointment. I’ve driven with her hundreds of miles over the years, so I’m familiar with her driving, and I’ve never been concerned about safety, but that day, she was driving erratically, swerving from lane to lane, cutting in front of cars she apparently couldn’t see, seemed to have no depth perception, had a hard time hearing, could barely handle the steering wheel. Bizarrely, she had no idea what she was doing. To her, all was fine, she was just tired after a sleepless night. In fact, when I later mentioned that it would have been better to have cancelled the appointment, she said she had no idea there was any need.

I wondered if she’d been having a mini stroke, so when she next went to the doctor, I urged her to tell him the story. She did. What she discovered is that all out-of-whackness was caused her insomnia the previous night.

That is why this story is important and why, even though I worry my friend might think my writing this might be a betrayal, I ignored my inclination for self-censorship and posted it anyway. If you have a sleepless night, especially if you are getting up in years, please stay home even if you feel fine. Truly, the symptoms she showed were traumatic and life-threatening (for me too) and are common side effects of a sleepless night. It makes me wonder how many people are going about their lives as if everything is fine, when in fact, it isn’t.

I’m lucky in that I don’t worry about not sleeping. If I have a rare sleepless night, I just stay home the next day. And if I ever can’t because of an appointment, I hope I am as smart as I am urging you to be and cancel the appointment.

It’s funny how small things can have such devastating effects. We never think of a sleepless night as being life threatening in the short run, but it is or it can be.

So be careful. Please. And don’t drive if you’ve had a sleepless night.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, dealing with old age, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , . 13 Comments »

Profound Advice

May 29, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s the most profound piece of advice you’ve been given? Did you take it?
View all responses

WordPress, the host of my blog, is starting to pull out all sorts of tricks to get us more involved, or so I imagine, since people tend not to like long-form blogging anymore, seeming to prefer the photos, quick clips, and brief comments posted on most social networking sites. Some of what WordPress is doing is fun — for example, I won a “streak freeze” badge, which if I’m reading it right, if I miss a day of blogging activity, it still counts as an active day. It won’t matter to me and my personal stats, though. If I miss a day, I’m honest enough to admit it, if only to myself, but so far this year, I’ve posted each day. (149 days in a row so far.)

Oddly, though WordPress does keep tabs of my posting “streak,” they’ve only been counting the past ten days for their new activity badge, so according to that I’m on a 10-day streak.

Another thing they are doing, besides the badges and different challenges, is listing the blogs I posted on a particular day. Supposedly, I’ve only posted five times on a May 29th, but they don’t seem to include the ten years prior to 2016 when I was blogging every day. If I really cared, of course, I could go back and find those posts for myself, but I don’t. Don’t care, I mean. The past is the past.

Still, I did check out a few of the previous May 29 posts that they listed, and I came across an interesting one that seems to fit today’s blog prompt. In the post, When You Have to Go, I mentioned all the different places I went when I had to “go” during my cross-country trip, and I found a bit of advice that I’d forgotten. I don’t even remember who told me, but it was profound to me, anyway. She suggested that when I was camping, I should take a quart yogurt container into the tent for late night emergencies. The container easily contours to fit, and the cover made it spill proof. I followed her advice, and it truly was miraculous! I keep a container in my house in case of plumbing problems, which has also been a boon.

Okay, so the advice wasn’t profound in the sense of emotional or philosophical depth, or of something with far-reaching significance, and I’m sure it wasn’t the most profound advice I’d ever been given (though I can’t think of any such advice offhand), and yet, when you have to go, there’s nothing more profound than a place (or a yogurt container) to find relief.

Incidentally, the photo attached to this post is one I took at the Kohler Design Center located in Kohler, Wisconsin. If you look closely, you will see that the sculpture, which took up an entire wall, was created from dozens of stacked toilets.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, How to, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , . 11 Comments »

The Perfect Road Trip

May 24, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you plan the perfect road trip?
View all responses

The perfect road trip, obviously, is the one that’s perfect for you, so my experience might not be applicable. For one thing, I had years to plan since I was taking care of my aged father at the time and couldn’t take off even if I had wanted to. For another thing, grief still lay heavily on me, so I wouldn’t have enjoyed the trip even if I could have taken off. For yet another thing, it was great having such a long time to plan because a big part of a road trip is in the planning.

And the not planning.

I had originally wanted to do an epic hiking trip, such as one of the long trails or a walk across the country or anything that would take me out of myself and perhaps change both me and the trajectory of my life. When it turned out that I couldn’t do an epic hike (too much water to carry and not enough stamina), I decided to walk across the country my own way by driving from campsite to campsite and from hiking trail to hiking trail. That way, I got the feel of a lot of different places as well as the feel of a doing a long hike without actually hiking the whole way.

Once I’d decided on the project, then it was time to decide what gear I needed for where I wanted to go. Since I left in February, my itinerary was obvious — along the southern edge of the country. Then, since I had no camping supplies, the next step was to research what I needed. I had a lot of backpacking equipment in preparation for the backpacking hike that never happened (except for one overnight hike and hundreds of day trips), but no car camping gear, such as a livable tent and heavier clothes. I of course posted all this preparation online, and some people found it amusing to watch what I was doing. I suppose it was amusing, my buying for a camping trip when I’d never camped before, especially since I might not even have been able to go on the long trip. But the preparation was important to me regardless of what might have happened in what at the time was an unforeseeable future.

I knew a lot of the spots where I wanted to stop — mostly national parks and national monuments, but also people I wanted to visit. (Many of my online friends volunteered to host me. Offline people warned me about going to stay with people I’d never met face to face, but in every case, the person I met in real life was exactly what they were like online, so it felt like what it was — a continuation of an established friendship.) I also left a lot unplanned because I didn’t want to keep to a strict schedule and I knew there would always be tantalizing vistas and advertisements along the road to drag me off course.

I was lucky; since I had no home at the time (my father had died, the house sold, and I had yet to decide where I was going to live), the trip didn’t have to be a quickie affair. In fact, I was gone almost six months. I might never have returned, but I had promised to do a dance performance, which put me on the clock, but it was still a lengthy trip. All the preparation helped make the whole adventure easier, including the “not planning” I mentioned above. As I travelled, people I didn’t know but who knew me through my grief blogs, invited me to stop by, which added surprising twists to my journey. In one case, a woman I met at a campground invited me to visit, and I decided what the heck, and that had surprising twists in a different way since I felt as I’d stumbled into a Southern Gothic story. Whew! I was never so glad to set on down the road.

I also didn’t camp as often as I’d planned because some of the campgrounds were closed or they didn’t feel right, or they were too full or too empty, but that’s where the money I’d set aside for a motel fund came in handy. As I’d learned, always plan for a change of plans.

If you can’t take a road trip and wish to do one vicariously, you can follow my trip here: Road Trip 2016 | Bertram’s Blog. It truly was a remarkable experience, both the road trip itself and the fun of planning it.

You can also plan a road trip without ever intending to go anywhere. Pick a route, follow along the road with Google maps or — heaven forbid! — a paper map, then see what photos and information you can find. With all the online resources available, there is a lot you can see in the palm of your hand.

Oh, I almost forgot — the most important thing when planning the perfect road trip? Having fun!

Chiricahua National Monument

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in Adventure, blogging, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

The Venerable Vegetable

May 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
View all responses

There used to be many words and phrases that annoyed me, constructions such as “110%” and “intestinal fortitude,” but those instances seem so innocuous now that other words have begun to be used half to death (to the death of the word, that is), words like fascist and nazi and racist and whatever happens to be the phobe of the day.

I don’t know if I’m getting used to words that are so overused that they’ve become meaningless or if I’m less critical or . . . who knows. All I know is that there are now fewer words that irk me. And yet there is one word that I will never, ever use. Will never, ever hear without my teeth gritting or feeling the word scrape down my back like some unseen claw.

I can avoid other words, even the most hateful and prevalent, because people I’m around in real life don’t use them, and if I’m reading the words online, I can quickly skim past them before they sneak in under my skin.

But there is that one word, a word I can barely manage to even type, so I’ll close my eyes and hope I get it right. “Veggies.” There. I did it. Whew! The very sight, the very sound of that mawkish word gags me, but it is now universal. It’s as if no one knows how to say or write or spell the word “vegetables” anymore. I mean that literally. I am the only person I know who says “vegetables.” I can understand urging small children to eat their “veggies,” but when said by an adult to an adult, it seems . . . disrespectful.

Are vegetables really that onerous that they need an infantile nickname? Are we in such a hurry that we can’t manage to say the whole of the venerable “vegetable?” And it is a venerable word. It comes from the Medieval Latin word vegetabilis, meaning “growing, flourishing, or full of life.” It was used from the Middle Ages on to denote all plants, not just edible ones, because plants are capable of life and growth as opposed to inert minerals.

And so what do we have today instead of life and growth and vigor? The cringeworthy “veggies,” which means absolutely nothing.

I realize I am one of the few purists left when it comes to words. Oh, I know the argument, that language is ever evolving, and I understand that. I would just prefer that it evolved around other words I don’t have to hear every day even from people I like.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

World Domination

May 21, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Well, this is an interesting — and utterly amusing — turn of events. WordPress, the company that hosts this blog, seems to have started listing blog achievements. It’s not public, only I can see my badges of achievements (unless, of course, I take a screen shot as I did below). As you can see, I have been awarded a badge, just an electronic image, but still . . . World Domination!!

Yay!! Unfortunately, this achievement really doesn’t mean world domination, which is just as well. I have no idea what I would do as a world dominatrix, nor do I have any idea why I would want to do any of those things even if I did have an idea of what I wanted to do.

Still, it’s cool (and a bit intimidating) to know that people from over one hundred and fifty countries have visited this blog. (It’s more like one hundred and ninety, but who’s counting. Actually, WordPress is counting. And so am I, apparently.)  And it’s nice to have official confirmation that the world is paying attention. I’ve posted before about all the countries that have visited, and you can see the list from 2020 if you click here: Who Visits My Blog. Back then, out of a total of perhaps 195 countries in the world (plus the Vatican), only six countries had not put in an appearance. I checked my latest stats, and it appears those six countries are still the only holdouts, so if you know anyone who lives in Svalbard, Turkmenistan, Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, Chad, or Central African Republic, please send them this link!

What an amazing thing the internet is. Who knew that some aging woman sitting alone at a computer in a tiny little house in a tiny little town in the corner of a middling state could have made an impression on all those people from all those places. Modesty (and truth) forces me to admit that it’s possible I didn’t make any impression since the visits were could be some wayward algorithms out touring the world, but still, you’re here, so I made an impression on someone.

Thank you for helping me reach world domination!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

 

Posted in blogging, culture, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Erasing Movies

May 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you could erase one movie from your memory and watch it again for the first time, which one would it be?
View all responses

I found this blog prompt amusing because except for a few movies that I’ve seen multiple times, such as “Let it Ride” and “The Princess Bride,” I’ve pretty much erased every movie I’ve ever seen from memory, so seeing any of them again would be seeing them for the first time. I didn’t purposely erase them, you understand. Life did. Time did. In fact, the only titles I remember are the two listed above.

When Jeff and I first moved to an area where the only television programming we could get was through cable, we decided to splurge and sign up for a premium movie package. Back then, when such channels were new, we had forty to fifty new movies to watch every month. As time went on, and more channels were created and more deals made, the new offerings became less and less until there were only a handful of new movies to watch each month. So we watched a lot of movies over and over again.

Before then, I’d seldom gone to the movies because I preferred to read since I could set my own pace, and I never even owned a television until Jeff and I got together, so movie watching was new to me. I think we watched just about every movie ever made until . . . hmm. I don’t remember until when.

I could watch movies if I wanted — I have hundreds of movies that Jeff had collected and although I never use it, I do have a television. Unfortunately, movie-watching doesn’t have the same effect when you watch them alone as they do when you watch them with someone who has the same level of appreciation. Besides, I seem to have erased the idea of movie watching from memory as well as the movies themselves. Despite the television’s blank eye staring at me, I never even consider watching a movie.

Perhaps someday I will watch some of those collected movies again, but until then, the movie erasure continues, so that when I do watch them, they will be new.

Not that it matters if I do remember. I like knowing ahead of time what is happening — I’m past the stage in my life where nail-biting tension has any allure. I like seeing the action, like knowing as it is happening what the characters will be facing before they do since it adds an extra level of participation. Oddly, I don’t like either in my life — not tension, and certainly not knowing the future, which if known, would probably bring with it a whole lot of tension.

So I guess, to answer the question: there isn’t any specific movie I would like to see again for the first time. As of right now, there isn’t any movie I want to see at all.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 7 Comments »

A Quiet Feeling of Contentment

May 19, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a simple pleasure in life that brings you joy?
View all responses

I looked up the meaning of joy because I was curious if my personal meaning matched the prevalent meaning, and it appears to be the same. To me, joy is an intense feeling, a kinetic emotion of delight and elation and even jubilation. I call it a kinetic emotion because it seems to be one of movement, an uplifting rather than a more static feeling of perhaps contentment or satisfaction.

Nothing anymore gives me that kinetic feeling of joy, nor does much of anything make me feel the lowering kinetic emotions such as anger and angst and outrage. I’m usually balanced somewhere in the middle rather than clinging to a vastly swinging emotional pendulum, which is how I like it.

There are many simple activities that bring me satisfaction, that take me out of myself and absorb my attention. I used to go to the library all the time, but I’ve taken against that simple pleasure, and so I find other things to do rather than spend all my time reading. Daily blogging, obviously, is one thing that takes up time once dedicated to reading. (I say obviously because . . . here I am!)

I’ve also bought a bunch of pencil puzzles books, a deal since they are outdated magazines, but that’s certainly not a problem since they’re all new to me. There are plenty of different kind of puzzles to keep my mind active, and I tend to think doing puzzles is better for mental stimulation than reading is.

Another activity I’m getting back into is paint-by-number. I used to get a kit occasionally when I was a child, and always enjoyed them, but then they disappeared for decades. My sister sent me a couple of kits for Christmas a few years ago, and that got me started again. They make me feel as if I am actually painting when all I am doing is coloring with paints, but filling in all those shapes satisfies something in me — my sense of order, perhaps.

Doing puzzles seems to be replacing reading, though I do read the books I have in the house especially when I eat. (I can’t seem to develop the habit of sitting down at a table by myself to eat. I know it’s supposed to be better for me, but it seems too bizarre and maybe too earthy to do nothing but concentrate on eating, which leads me to believe I don’t really like to eat.) And doing paint-by-number seems to be replacing computer games, though I still check in with a hidden object game most days.

And, of course, there is gardening. How could I have forgotten that, especially since I just came in from watering my plants and picking a few weeds.

Doing simple things gives my life a sense of balance, peace, and sometimes satisfaction, though the satisfaction doesn’t come from the doing so much as the having done. Seeing a picture come to life, finishing a puzzle book and starting a new one, seeing flowers growing in my yard and basking in the greenness all give me something better than joy. They give me a quiet feeling of contentment.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, blogging, gardening, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Dealing With Life

May 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

It seems as if I’ve been doing a lot of blogging lately about my ideal life, though sometimes it was only because those blog prompts came up and I felt as if I had something to say. Other times it was because that particular day did feel ideal. It’s made me wonder, though, if I sounded smug with all that “ideal life” talk. For those of you who have been with me all through my years of grief over Jeff, over the loss of my father and my older brother, the loss of whatever stability I’d found, you know that my current ideal life has been hard won. The posts are more about gratitude for finding a safe haven than about congratulating myself on winning the “life” lottery.

I also know, as do you, how quickly life can change. One day one is the midst of the most terrible angst imaginable, and the next day one is okay. Well, not the next day, though from my perspective today, it can feel like it. But I have thousands of blog posts archived under the heading “grief posts” to show the truth of how many days separated the days of angst from these days of peace.

These “ideal life” posts are strictly about today. I hope no matter what traumas descend on me in the future, these days of gratitude and peace will help give me the courage to face what might come. I can hope, of course, for many years of this “ideal life,” but life tends not to take our hopes into consideration. Though who knows — some people believe we create our own reality, so perhaps these “ideal life” posts are helping create a future that is as easy as my life is today.

It is funny, though, that I am going through a time of relative freedom from body malfunctions and pain. There have been episodes over the past few years of knee problems, piriformis muscle and tendon issues, and various other trivialities (considering the life/death spectrum). I’ve managed to find a way to handle whatever has come my way, and currently there is a weird bout of catarrh that comes and goes, probably due to allergies, but for the most part, there are no malfunctions for me to deal with. That will change, too, but again, I am grateful for these days of ease (as opposed to dis-ease). And in fact, they should be celebrated despite any hint of what could be conceived as smugness.

Do I “deserve” these days? Who knows. Does anyone “deserve” anything that happens to them? Life is just . . . life. We deal with the good as well as the bad, though to be honest, the good is a whole heck of a lot easier to deal with!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, dealing with old age, home, life. Tags: , , , . 4 Comments »

Learning Something New

May 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you stay motivated when learning something new?
View all responses

This must be a question for people who are forced to learn things they don’t want to, such as for school or work or new technology, because otherwise it makes no sense. At least not for me. Learning something new has always been its own motivation. Now that I think about it, learning something new seems as if it is sort of the point of life. If we never learn anything new, where would we be? Lolling around in oversized cribs, I imagine, crying from sheer boredom.

The joy of learning is written in our genes. That’s obvious if you’ve ever watched babies, newly sprung from their playpens, crawling all over, learning new things, trying to pull themselves up. And oh, that grin of sheer pride and joy when they manage that first step. They didn’t need to stay motivated, the learning itself was the goal, though encouragement from their parents never hurt. Obviously, there are some things babies need to learn that perhaps they don’t want to, such as using the potty or not touching the pretty fire, but for the most part, babies learn because they want to. Because to them, learning is playing, and playing is learning.

There is an old quote: we don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing. I never liked that quote because it’s too specious, too simplistic, too out of touch with reality. Look at professional athletes. They have to stop playing because they get too old to be able to compete with younger players, not the other way around.

Now, if I were to substitute “learning” for playing, then that quote makes sense, though again, it doesn’t always hold true. Often the elderly can no longer learn because of growing cognitive issues, but still, I tend to think curiosity (and boredom) does motivate people of any age to learn new things. Besides, whether we want to or not, we have to continue learning as we age if only to learn how to do things we once did with ease but that now seem complicated, like opening jars or bending to pick something up. For sure we have to learn how to be mindful or else a reckless step can lead to disaster.

Since writing this has convinced me of the importance of learning — with or without a need for motivation — I’m sitting here trying to think what I’ve recently learned, but I can’t really think of anything. At least nothing fun. I learned a lot of fun things in the past decade — dancing, camping, buying a house, taking care of a house, the tarot, landscaping, gardening — but not so much today except for small things I learn while reading or gardening or doing puzzles. The only specific thing I can think of is that I am learning more of the history of the middle east than I ever cared to know. I never did understand anything of their history or who they were or why they did what they did — it was simply too confusing, uninteresting, and of no particular value to my life, but now I’m seeing a much broader picture, one that dates back almost to the first days of civilization, but specifically back to the 7th century. Is it important to know the history? Only if I want to know the historical reasons for a lot of today’s events, which I don’t, not really. But it is learning, so that’s good.

What I need is to find something new to learn. Something I want to learn just for the fun of learning, something I don’t have to worry about motivating myself to learn. Though what that might be, I don’t know, because if I did know, I’d already be learning it.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, dealing with old age, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Books and Surprises

May 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a book that completely surprised you?
View all responses

I can’t say that any book completely surprised me, though some books have surprised me, in both good and bad ways.

I am currently rereading Noel Barber’s novels. I finished Tanamera and am now on Sakkhara. Neither should have surprised me since I’d read them before, but they did surprise me, though I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

I’ve always thought of Tanamera as a Malaysian Gone with the Wind, and Sakkhara as an Egyptian one, though to be honest, I never paid much attention to the romances that thread through the stories. To me, both of those books are about the exotic locations — Singapore and Cairo in the 1930s and 40s — and about the war experiences in those places as well as their problems with being British colonies. In both books, a British family is friends with a native family, and it’s through the relationship between those two families that the conflicts are filtered, and where the real story lies. What I especially like about the books is seeing World War II from a different perspective. Barber was a British war correspondent, so he tells the stories both from the British point of view as well as the location’s point of view. For example, the main war in Singapore and Malaya (as it was known then) was with the Japanese. And originally, the main war in Egypt was with the Italians before the Germans came.

All that is good, and what I remembered. What I didn’t remember — and why it came as a surprise — is that the romance is basically the same in both books and is rather boring: a love triangle (or maybe quadrangle) between the two families as well as an outsider that one of the brothers got pregnant and had to marry rather the woman he loved.

Not a problem, really. It’s no worse than most secondary romantic plots, though I found myself surprisingly on the side of the other brother. Though the first brother (the sort of hero) married not for love but because of his indiscretion, most things worked out for him. And in the end, so did the romance. While the other brother in both stories lost everything. (Makes me wonder if Barber had problems with his brother.)

Next on my list is Farewell to France, basically the same story as the other two, though — obviously — in France (in the Champagne district), and the hero is of American descent, not British. I don’t remember the romance part, though I would be willing to bet it too is the same.

Even though I found it surprising that I was so underwhelmed by the romance aspect and was surprised that the books told the same story, I still like them. It really is interesting seeing basically the same story told in three different countries showing three different perspectives of what truly was a world war.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, books, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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