When Grief Makes Room
I popped my coffee cup that says “you are loved” bought at La Comer for a few pesos, into the microwave. When I couldn’t hear the beeps to set the timer I knew I’d forgotten my hearing aids. Trotted to the bedroom in the condo. Put the left hearing aid in and it gave me the “working” tone. Put the right hearing aid in. Same good news. But then the left hearing aid started to beep. Oh no. I’d just changed the little cone the day before. Took the hearing aid out. Put it back. It gave the working tone. Then it beeped again. Now my imagination is going wild. I’m in San Jose del Cabo, in Mexico, far from a Danish hearing aid repair place. How will I get through customs trying to understand what people are saying? Will I hear about a flight change? And then with the left hearing aid in my hand, it beeps again! Except that it isn’t the hearing aid at all. It’s the microwave telling me my coffee is hot. Jerry would have laughed.
These are the dangers of an over-active imagination, skipping toward the worst. I keep having to relearn that my time is better spent doing what C.S Lewis observes about life: “Something quite unexpected has happened.”
I’m in Baja where 50 years ago Jerry and I first ventured here together when I turned 30 on the shores of the Sea of Cortez. He gave me a turquoise and silver bracelet and a starfish that had washed up and was lifeless on the shore. For years I kept that starfish until one of the dogs discovered it would make a great toy!
It’s been a hard transition coming here for the first time without him. But then, this morning, after water aerobics without Jerry watching from the balcony as he always did, I turned and faced the Sea of Cortez and gasped at the deepness of its blue, the white sand, the sky. And for the first time I wasn’t sad. In that unexpected moment, Jerry was nearer than I thought. I am discovering – as those on this journey so much longer than me knows – , that finding a new relationship with the one we’ve lost does not mean the grief will go away. It will change while still being the bridge to our “love and life together” as author Francis Wheeler wrote in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
So instead of being sad that Jerry won’t share the sunrise that caused awe this morning I am now talking to him about it. I share its beauty and promise of new sunrises yet to come, pause at the unexpected joy. I find this critical for the journey as I live in the midst of sorrows from his absence to the tragedies in Minnesota and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza and all around, I am with intention seeking to notice those unexpected things, cherish them. Not surprising I suppose, my word for 2026 is intention. It gets me up in the morning, let’s me know I have things to do in this world that is hurting besides worry about my hearing aids working. Have you chosen a word for 2026? Let me know what word and perhaps an unexpected thing that warmed your breaking heart.
Book News
‘Tis the season … of plans for a book release, scheduling events, writing a third book in a series and discovering new research that will change the trajectory of that third book, the first book written without the ordinary input of my Jerry. One exciting thing is that I can reveal the title of book three (though not yet a cover!) I had some great guesses from readers on my Facebook author page but no one got it! I’ll find another way to give a book away.
The title of book three is…Beyond the Breaking Waves. It will come out in 2027.
Meanwhile, you’ll have the joy of book two in the Women of Cannon Beach Series, With the Enduring Tides. April 21st is the release date but many who preordered book one, Across the Crying Sands, told me they received their books early! At any rate, to keep up a new tradition, I’ll launch the book at the first bookstore where I did a signing for Homestead in 1991 and Across the Crying Sands last year. Paulina Springs Books in Sisters, OR, at 6:30pm on April 21st. So despite new research information changing book three, book two is set to go. I hope you’ll enjoy finding out what happened to Mary, John, their children, Jewell and a few new women to set the tone for another installment of the Women of Cannon Beach working their own way through challenges and change through family, friends and faith.
Web World
In the early 1990s, my niece Michelle Hurtley set me up with something called a webpage. The name Jane Kirkpatrick, was already “taken” whatever that meant, and so we named the site jkbooks (plural) not knowing then that one day I’d write 40 plus books. I wrote a “monthly memo” about life on a ranch and posted it on the site. This was before Facebook and Substack and social media. That simple memo has now grown into Story Sparks, this monthly newsletter with thousands of readers who follow along with my family stories and reflections, including those that first appeared in Homestead (Whitaker Publishing Group), which is still in print.
There aren’t a lot of occasions when I can say I was exposed to something that astonished me but I remember being in awe by my niece telling me about email and being stunned that it would let me communicate with people around the world. I’ve had fine webmasters since my niece moved on to other much more complicated digital things. They always made my site better.
Fast forward to 2026. Now it’s my great niece (her daughter) Sarah Robinson of Robinson Design Co., who is championing my website and helping me thoughtfully share my work with readers. She’s guiding me through the ever-changing world of social media, developing plans and content, and helping me navigate the wider community of books and readers with care and clarity.
(That’s me holding Sarah at the ranch, and Sarah Today.)
We’ve recently (she, not me) finished rebuilding and updating my website, and I hope you’ll take a tour of jkbooks.com. There you’ll find press packets for bookstores and event organizers, blog interviews I’ve participated in, writing tips, book reviews and blurbs, and quite a few new additions we’re excited about. You can also contact me there and sign up for Story Sparks, which enters you into the big drawing connected to With the Enduring Tides, along with other surprises.
Your feedback about the site is also appreciated. I’m pretty excited about the role Sarah is playing in highlighting this new series, too. I hope you’ll give her a shoutout if you like what you see!
News Flash
Hurrah! The large print book of Across the Crying Sands went to a reader from Florence, OR. I also found two more large print books and when I’m back in the US, I’ll draw another two names and ask my precious Oregon neighbors to send them once I have the snail mail addresses. Thank you for participating!
Author Highlight
Laura DeNooyer is a Wisconsin author whose works are quite wonderful bringing to life the man behind the Wiard of Oz through her fictional titles, the latest being The Broken Weathervane. I highlighted this book in one of my Word Whisperings. Here’s a link to her blog where she’ll post February 24th about my work . What makes Laura’s work so fascinating (to me) is how she takes a fictional idea and wraps connections to the exquisite details she’s researched about L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, making him come to life in new ways. She expands his influence beyond being the author of that classic. Please check her out at lauradennooyer-author.com.
A second author I hope you’ll check out is C.J. Lake, who wrote Eugene Pioneer: Voices from the Frontier published by Arcadia Press. This book of love comes from her excitement of stories from an old cemetery. It’s a collection of photographs like that of a Calapooya poet Eliza Young in Brownsville, OR. (I wish I’d known about her when I wrote The Memory Weaver) and biographies gleaned from a PNW Civil-War Era cemetery. These are my kind of stories.
Events
Paulina Springs Books
April 21, 2026 – 6:30pm – Paulina Spring Books launch of With the Enduring Tides. Hood Street, Sisters, OR
The Bowman Museum
April 23, 2026 – 6:00pm – Presentation, signing and access to Jane’s latest and other titles. Bowman Museum, 246 N. Main, Prineville, OR.
Cannon Beach History Center and Museum
May 9, 2026 – Cannon Beach Museum presentation and tea. Saturday before Mother’s Day. Limit to 20. Ticket information coming soon.
Also working on scheduling a visit to the Cannon Beach Library where Jane will be giving away the coastal treasures related to the second book including this antique duck decoy with shell feathers, just like Jewell worked on in book one. Stay tuned for that date and others.
Rupie's Renderings
I’ve become a traveling Cavalier! Another of my mom’s nieces (she has a lot of them!) has been looking after me while my mom is in Mexico, wherever that is. She said she’d be back. I miss her just like I miss my dad. Niece Nancy takes me on longer walks though, to the dog park and twice to Yuma, Arizona. We didn’t actually walk to Yuma. (Isn’t that what peeps in the Northwest do each winter, Escape to Yuma? I feel a poem coming on….) Anyway, I’m a pretty good traveler, just watching the world zoom by. I’m seat-belted in behind the passenger seat so if there’s an accident, my mom says, I don’t become a “projectile bomb” soaring through the air. I’m also doing a lot better when an F-L-Y comes around.
The vet, my mom and my mom’s great-niece (a dog trainer) recommended some compose medicine. I kind of like that word, compose. It’s what my mom does when she writes or so she says. But it also makes me look pretty regal and restful, even when a F-L-Y stumbles by. The compose is temporary my mom says and she tells me that she and my dad took “talk medicine” many times when they were together. “Good therapy makes good marriages” she says and also, good dogs. Take your medicine! I’ll see you when my mom gets back in February.
Closing
As part of finding my way in a new world, I’m being more proactive in asking people to post reviews if you’ve read one of my books and liked it. Actually, even if you didn’t like it, you can post on Bookbub, Goodreads, Amazon as the main sites because people will see it and wonder about someone who could write such a terrible book! I’m also not going to be your source for buying books from the site. I’ll encourage you to purchase from the publisher (often preorders with discounts), your favorite local bookstore and then online. I still have some boxes of books in the garage (Promises of Hope for Difficult Times which is out of print). But hopefully you’ll find titles at your favorite independent bookstores. Keeping those stores open is important for your community to thrive. Should you want a signed copy, shoot me an email via my website and I will send you a bookplate with my signature that you can put inside the book you bought in your local store!
Tonight my cousin and his wife are in Viet Nam, watching the votives float and light up the Hoi River. It means “Memory River.” I am living in a memory river these days. But the ceremony of lights is a reminder that things do change and sometimes for the better. Thank you for all your kind words these past six months and even before. Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter that “dying is a wild night and a new road.” I am, with intention, moving through the wild night and stepping onto that new road. I know I am not alone. Thank you for being there with me.
