Back

The last bottle of champagne | Day 165 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Jun 15, 2023· 2 minutes

🇩🇰 Also available in Danish 🇩🇰

On the last day we spent with my sister's family in Sweden, we shared the last bottle of champagne from my mother, whom we all lost four years ago. My sister and I lost our mother; our children lost their grandmother; the men in the house lost their mother-in-law.

We made a simple toast to her. This is how we cope with grief by now. A simple toast. To our mother.

It meant a lot. The little smile. The sigh.

The bottle was the final one from our mother's home, and my sister's husband had been kind enough to remember to bring it. When the two families spend time together, it is precious time. There is nothing exciting to say about the things we did, the boardgames, the drawings, the Swedish children’s television from the seventies, the investigation of ancient technology in the house, the little walk, yet another dip in the lake, the cooking and cleaning, working with the dogs, the conversations, the gaming.

It is not a Great Adventure.

Except it is.

It is the Greatest Adventure of them all.

It is love in real life.

Living in deep connection with someone, several someones, who means the world. Loved ones. Precious ones. My love for my sister's family is as deep as the one I hold for my own, and every single little interaction we get to have is like another pearl in a shrine in my heart.

The time we get to share. Even the losses we share.

Sharing a bottle of champagne in the midst of what looks like an ordinarily chaotic day with ten people and three dogs in one house looks like close to nothing.

On the contrary, it is everything.

Love and light

Cecilie-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad

🇩🇰 Also available in Danish 🇩🇰

 

Thank you for reading
I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our life like this, and we get very happy when we get feedback from you. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

Life rarely goes as planned—and in unschooling families, that’s part of the point. In this conversation, Sandra Dodd, Cecilie Conrad, and Sue Elvis e…Read more
The work-life-nomad balance includes a lot of moving around. A lot of adapting. A lot of driving in our case, as we are based out of our van. And som…Read more
What counts as a resource when you don’t follow a school curriculum? In this episode, Cecilie Conrad, Sandra Dodd, and Sue Elvis look at how unschool…Read more
How it all ties together: The unschooling, the love, the strategies, the stories. And how we ended up studying math while driving on the Autobahn fro…Read more
What happens when fully unschooled young adults with no preparation and no big planning suddently decide to enter the educational system? And how doe…Read more
Did I also write about love yesterday? Is there anything more important—will there ever be anything else at the center? Read more
With our usual delayed precision, we drove to the airport at the last minute to do what I believe is an international tradition: to be there when the…Read more
It seems our tribe is spread out all over. We find the right people scattered around the globe, and we find that being nomadic is as much about retur…Read more
I see confidence, creativity, fun, self-exploration, adventures, thoughtfulness, learning journeys, and passionate commitment to connections everywhe…Read more