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Aerial View of a Mountain River
Inspiring
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Quotes from The Trail to Tincup: Love Stories at Life’s End Joyce L. Hocker

From Blurbs: “A rare and honest glimpse into the soul and spirit of grief and sadness. Hocker emerges from the valley of suffering with a glow of love, insight, self-understanding and wisdom.” (Dr. Art Bochner, Univ. of South Florida, ret.)

“The Trail to Tincup pulsates with tenderness…a soulful memoir.” (Ira Byock, MD, Dying Well and The Four Things That Matter Most.”)

From the Book:

 

“…Robert Romanyshy is introduced….As he begins to read from…The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation, I begin to weep….I am going to need to know this echoes in my mind when I wake in the night.”pp. 21,22.

“Janice and I are bored….Climbing up a hill we,…find a cemetery outside the ghost town of Tincup….Janice says, “When I die, I want to be buried here.” P. 34

Now we are attending a home death without a trained midwife. P. 140

I ponder that one of the important things that happens before death, if one is very fortunate, is that we forgive each other.   P. 143

I sing “There’s a long, Long Trail a-Winding,” Mom and Dad’s favorite song…. P, 144

…”I’m missing my mother intensely….I find and read the letters she wrote me …in the three-ring binders, with quilted covers she made from scraps of dresses she sewed for me…. P. 156

This is a man who invited the Negro Brotherhood of hhis denomination, in 1949, to meet as coequals when they held their separate state conferences in Charlotte, North Carolina. P. 167

“And at night, The Big Dipper and Orion wheel over the starlit sky, and somewhere, songs and stories echo around the campfires of long ago.” P. 37

“I regret what all those moves did to my family….I can’t say that I regret what I spoke about.” P. 169Dad told me, referring to Matt (his nurse), “No amount of money can pay for what people give freely.”  P. 171

“Then Janice passed out the words and led us all in “There’s a Long, Long Trail”…These songs came to define our parents to us kids. P. 49

“Gary and Ed walk up Willow Creek. “I don’t know how to do this, Ed says to Gary,. “I’ve never done this before.” “You will find your way, Gary replies.” P. 51

As Ed and I talked recently about these events, he saidk to me, “We hadn’t had any tragedies as a family then.” p. 58

Janice tellsk me, “I can’t play the piano right. And last night I could get the songs from my brain to my hands, so the Christmas Carols were terrible.” P. 63

Suddenly I am flattened on the hardwood of the dining room floor, wailing, keening, with no memory of falling. P. 67

Before I leave Fayetteville, I ask Janice if she is afraid. “Sometimes, but mostly not,” she replies. P. 81.

I am mad with grief. P. 101

Gary and I head out on a “back roads of Montana” trip…We need to recover from working while grieving. P. 115

…I must let go with my hands and my mind of what I thought I needed, to open my hands and heart to what I now need to embrace—my mother’s dying. P. 121

Mom explains, “They think I believe in traditional ideas, but I don’t, and I don’t wat to disappoint them….I mean about Heaven and the afterlife. I do’t want to let them down.” Pp. 129-130

Ed and I talk about how this way of dying at home…prevailed until very recently. In the remote mountains, we return to the old ways. Pp. 140-142.

I thank him for being a wonderful father.  I do not say goodbye.  P. 176

(Gary) writes a poem, “The Fate of Beautiful Women,” …This…helps me feel partnered by Gary. P. 182

…dancing the salsa in the rock gym…I almost see the strong presence of my mother, dancing and smiling across from me. P. 182

Imagination takes over my journal writing….You looked on all the women’s bodies…finally unconcerned that your one breast and your scar show clearly. P. 181

We set ourselves two tasks: to go through the cabin, determining what to keep, donate, and throw away; and to prepare our site at the Tincup cemetery.  P. 184

I will continue my interior dialogue with those I love….We grow along together. P. 192

We ground our grief in labor.  P. 188

When the memory keeper dies, what happens to the memories?  P. 193

I’m thinking now about the convergence of identity, the streams of genetic and storied inheritance coming down to me, creating me. P. 214

Kierkegard wrotel that we live our lives forward but understand them backwards, as though we are standing on the platform of the last car of a train….  P. 223

I am not my mother; I am my mother. P. 239

Up until now, I could not fathom letting go of any of Janice’s writing…Here they are—the journals from 1985 to 203…. P. 226

Writing—and teaching life writing—has …helped me release the tangled knots of grief and reclaim my life. P. 252

I wonder how my clients may feel. I love these people, and each goodbye brings poignancy for them and for me. P. 241

“Call the surgeon,” I hear someone say. That call’s for me, I realize. P. 261

I require rest—rest to heal from surgery, to lie down after more than a decade of grief and loss….no one can give me a permission slip to rest and heal except myself. P. 270

I an alive, and I am dancing the long- buried song of my soul. P. 277

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