In ‘Holding Hands with My Tears’, Erinbell Fanore opens a window into the tender, tangled terrain of grief and love. With raw honesty and poetic warmth, she invites us into a moment suspended in time—where heartbreak and homemade ravioli coexist, and where joy becomes a quiet act of resistance. This is a story of mourning, memory, and the deep, enduring power of choosing life, even in the shadow of loss.
In the wide ever changing landscape of mourning, different moments stand out. As grief rolls through my tissues, visceral memories surface. Some dark, some light, some fleeting and some nagging from corners I am not ready to look at. The messiness of life is heightened in the starkness of loss.
One memory, in particular, returns often and with acute clarity—perhaps because it carried within it all the seeds of what would follow.
The kitchen all aflutter in flour, music and our regular Fanore chaos. Our colourful walls warmly lit up by our lamp in the corner. On the table, a fresh bouquet of flowers bursting out of the mouth of our jade green fish vase. The balcony doors covered in steamy condensation from the cold winter night.
There is a normalcy inside the clear knowing that no longer can anything be normal. Smiles. Laughter. Teasing each other. Taking photos and texting them to our family far and wide.
Me rolling dough through the hand press pasta maker while the kids attended to one of the three different fillings for our homemade raviolis. Tom picks out the next CD to play, to dance to, to groove along with as we cook. DJ Tom infusing our kitchen disco with a life force of love.
It’s never just one thing. The tangled, chaotic joy of home snags on the sharp thorns of our heartbreak. Beat by beat, we pull ourselves together. Managing to have fun even as we fall apart.
Tom, my husband, my brave man, the love of my love life, had just been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The kids didn’t yet know how bad. They knew things were rough. They had seen him collapse in a sudden seizure that led to the discovery of his tumour. It got operated on before we could even catch our breath. They knew nothing would be the same but they didn’t know how quickly this was going to go.
The doctor gave him one year. Tom and I had just found out. What does one do with that? One year to live. What can one do with that, beside make make homemade ravioli? A recipe we had learned together from an Italian Nonna a few years earlier on holiday. One of our favourite family meals. Its labour intensiveness enriching the taste. The extra time put into making it, wonderfully savoured with each bite.
As our hearts were breaking, we came together and chose to include joy. I think that’s what kept us sane, well as sane as one can be going through what we did.
We adopted two mottos that came to define us:
We can do hard things.
We can do fun things.
We repeated them over and over that year and almost another year on top of that one. Tom was determined to suck as much marrow out of life as possible. He did all he could to outlive the prediction. He stretched 12 months into 22. What a guy. What a ride. What a challenge. What a life.
We can do hard things.
We can do fun things.
We needed both. Because, yeah, it was hard and is going to stay hard for as long as it does.
This is hard: The missing. The grieving. The longing. The frustration. The anger. The helplessness to the naturalness of life and death.
Yet without the active seeking out of fun, without the willingness to include and enjoy the beauty of life, its spontaneous moments of awe, I am sure I would have drowned completely.
I type this by candlelight, sitting on my balcony (Tom’s favourite spot in our apartment) listening to music (Tom was music. All music leads me back to him) feeling the immensity of loss with tears caught in the edges of my eyes. He is here and he is gone. Physically forever gone. The finality of it burns deeper than the fresh sting of jellyfish tentacles—an encounter so recent, its welts still rise on my skin. The swollen itching burns on my body are but “mere scratches” as the black night from Monty Python would say.
I don’t shut out the pain nor do I collapse into it. As best as I can (and some days it’s a very tenuous shaky affair), I include both: the pain & the delight. The darkness and the light. The personal “this totally sucks for me” and the universal “this is happening to so many.”
I keep remembering that we need to use both paddles at the same time: compassion and joy. If we only use one, we go in circles. We go nowhere.
So I paddle. With strong determination and a lot of acceptance that I am going to crash now and again, I paddle forward through the days with joy and compassion. I include the ache and I actively seek out what I find beautiful in each moment.
Right now it is the rustling of wind through the trees on this warm summer night with the glow of a candle gently lighting my balcony herbs. Nature, light, the immediacy of now. I turn towards them with gratitude, as I hold hands with my tears. Letting them flow down my cheeks; dropping on the keyboard almost in beat with the sad tune playing from the kitchen speaker.
I can do hard things.
I can do fun things.
I am full of gratitude for his love living through me. Full of appreciation for the life we created together that I am now asked to live onwards solo. I will keep making ravioli in the kitchen, even after the kids move out in a couple of months. I will cook for friends, old and new. I will keep bringing in the chaos and beauty of flour and music into my kitchen. Serving up time intensive meals to be slowly savoured in good company.
Together,
We can do hard things.
We can do fun things.
Erinbell will be facilitating the upcoming retreat Meeting Grief with an Open Heart: an Insight Yoga and Mindfulness Retreat on 26-30 October 2025.