My son, David Finkelman, 27, was killed by a distracted driver in 2014.He was a musician, university student and a beautiful human. I write my grief here.
Edmonton, Alberta 🇨🇦
Joined September 2011
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Jane Cardillo retweeted
I read some fantastic stories yesterday. Some deeply emotional, others light on the soul. I often need both to anchor myself and remain positive. A writer needs a tether to sanity when living so often inside one’s imagination.
Today, May 22, 2026, your #vss365 #prompt is #Tether
Jane Cardillo retweeted
The number of #vss365 writers is overwhelming in the best possible way. So many fantastic stories and poems appear throughout the day that I’m sure I’ve missed a few gems along the way. But I’m truly enjoying having a small part in each one. See you at 5am EST.😉
Jane Cardillo retweeted
With his pale horse and scythe, the Grim Reaper canters through a barren field of fallen soldiers, claiming their souls, while the parched earth is salted with their blood.
#vss365
#vssfantasy
Jane Cardillo retweeted
On barren land,
a man kept planting trees
one hundred years ago.
Now, one hundred years later,
I stand before a beautiful forest.
#vss365 #barren #micropoetry
Jane Cardillo retweeted
After losing a child, you are faced with arranging a funeral. Grief is at its rawest, gnawing away at every part of you. I sat in the waiting room, waiting for the funeral director to greet us. They talked about your loss and gave us a tour of the caskets. Things no parent should choose.
I sat there, clutching Charlotte’s last Chanel powder compact - unopened, of course. I also held onto Miles’s childhood teddy, Marmalade. Miles had given it to Charlotte in hospital. Miles said later that when he saw us come down the garden path without Charlotte, but with Marmalade, it broke him. I also sat in the funeral directors with a small plush hedgehog, a present from our school matron, Ruth, to Charlotte. She had given it to Charlotte on her first day of Year 7 because she knew how anxious she was. Lastly, I held her Minnie Mouse stocking - a Christmas present from her grandparents for her first Christmas. The photo was taken on 3.5.2013, Charlotte's last day in Year 11. 76 days later she was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
I had to choose an outfit, not a wedding dress. Rather, clothes for my daughter to be cremated in, along with shoes. I looked through the brochures containing all the caskets with tears pouring down my face, hardly able to turn the pages. I could have chosen pink or any colour I wanted, but Charlotte had always lived by the words “less is more.” I chose a simple wicker casket, and I knew she would have approved.
I drove a short distance down the road to the flower shop the funeral parlour had recommended. I wished I had been choosing a wedding bouquet with Charlotte instead. Again, I kept everything simple: three lilies laid on top, with small white posies placed around the handles of the casket.
Every minute of the day of the funeral, I wanted to run far away and pretend none of it was happening. But there is nowhere to run from grief, especially when it has wrapped itself around your entire life.
Charlotte died on 24.2.2016. Then, only weeks later, my aunt passed away on 24.3.2016. On Tuesday 29.3.2016, I lost my mother too. The world did not stop to let me breathe between losses; it simply kept taking.
Recently, I came across Charlotte’s birth and death certificates. To see those two documents placed side by side felt almost impossible to comprehend. One piece of paper marking the beginning of a life filled with hope, love, laughter, and memories; the other reducing an entire lifetime to a date, a time, and a signature. It is one of the most surreal feelings in the world holding proof that someone existed, and proof that they are gone, all within the space of two pieces of paper.
Grief changes the way you look at ordinary things. Paperwork becomes sacred. Handwriting becomes precious. A name printed in black ink suddenly carries the weight of an entire lifetime. And sometimes the smallest things, a certificate, a compact powder, a teddy, a little hedgehog, hold more love than words could ever explain.
Charlotte’s BAG has raised £385,000 directly funding research at Charlotte’s Lab, King’s College Hospital, London
The big difference with Charlotte's BAG is simple: we self-fund everything.
No merchandise
No salaries
No overheads
No advertising
We even cover the PayPal and PO Box fees personally so nothing is taken from the charity account.
If you want to donate to a brain tumour charity please think of us and pop a pound in Charlotte's Bag.
charlottesbag.org/
Please RT Thank you
Jane Cardillo retweeted
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Father Reeves sighed, recognising the voice. “Again?”
“I lied. About the sin I confessed to last time.”
“You can’t keep seeing #forgiveness every week for nothing.”
Paddy sighed. “Sorry, Father. I’ll try to sin next week.” #vss365
Jane Cardillo retweeted
At evenfall, the bellmaker buried his deaf daughter’s shoes beneath the orchard trees. By spring, the apples ripened with small hollow sounds inside them, and the village ate in silence, listening for her footsteps. No one passed the orchard without removing their shoes■#VSS365
Jane Cardillo retweeted
My baby brother, the mooseweiler with paws the size of snowshoes experienced rain for the first time today. He was rather offended by it making his ears wet at first and didn't realize it was simply wimpy snow. 🌧️🐾
Then he realized rain and dirt makes mud and mud means paw painting. There are now snowshoe sized paw prints down the hall and a unique paw painting on the blanket that covers the couch 🛋️. Turns out the hippo in a Rottweiler costume is a budding Picasso. 🎨👨🎨
#DogArt #PawPainting #WetEarDay
ALT Chesnyy and Kenji standing on a deck in the rain
Jane Cardillo retweeted
“Surely there’s been a mistake, a lapse in your due #diligence. Check your stupid list again.” Why do they think I have a list, someone that I answer to? They make death a fairy tale, an insult to what I am. I grab Bob by his scrawny neck and punt him far into the void.
#vss365
Jane Cardillo retweeted
#vss365 #prompt for 14 May 2026 is #unalloyed
the journey of us
keeps bringing
moments of unbridled
and unalloyed joy
making me grateful
for such priceless gifts
Jane Cardillo retweeted
Charlotte’s Brain Tumour Journey
18.2.1997 – 24.2.2016
Diagnosis to death: 951 days
Before Charlotte died, we were sitting together when she turned to me and said:
“When I’m dead, take my YouTube channel down. No one will ever be interested in a girl with a brain tumour.”
At that point, she had around 4,000 subscribers.
After Charlotte died, Miles and I made the decision to keep her channel online. We continued uploading unseen footage, talking about Charlotte, and sharing updates about the charity.
Charlotte was one of the very first young people, back in 2014, to publicly document her brain cancer journey online.
Without ever realising it, she left Miles and me a legacy through all of that filming.
One day, I would love to see Charlotte’s channel reach 100,000 subscribers so that we could hold the Silver YouTube Button up to the sky and say:
“You did it.”
To date, Charlotte’s channel has been viewed more than 27 million times and now has over 93,600 subscribers.
If you are able to subscribe, we would be incredibly grateful. Not for us neither Miles nor I are YouTubers but for Charlotte, who lost her life to glioblastoma at just 19 years old.
Please RT With thanks
youtube.com/charlotteeades
Jane Cardillo retweeted
In the autumn of 1942, a slight, 32-year-old Polish social worker named Irena Sendler passed through the gates of the Warsaw Ghetto with a carpenter’s toolbox in her arms. Beneath the hammers and nails lay a drugged six-month-old infant, breathing softly, utterly silent. One cry would have meant instant death for both of them. Irena smiled at the guards; they waved her through. They never suspected that this quiet woman would repeat the journey 2,499 more times.
The ghetto was a slow-motion extermination. Starvation, disease, and random murder stalked every street. Jewish parents faced a choice no human being should ever have to make: keep their child and watch them waste away, or hand them to a stranger who promised a chance—however thin—at life.
Irena came officially to inspect for typhus. In reality, she came to steal children from death.
Babies left in toolboxes or ambulances under false bottoms. Toddlers sedated and tucked into potato sacks. Older children led by the hand through the stinking, lightless sewers while German boots marched overhead. “Not a sound,” she whispered as rats scurried past their feet.
She knew that the rescued children would be given new names, new religions, new families. Their pasts would vanish unless someone remembered. So, on fragile scraps of tissue paper, Irena wrote each child’s real name, their parents’ names, and their new hiding place. She rolled the papers tight, slipped them into glass jars, and buried them beneath an apple tree in a neighbor’s garden. If she were caught and killed, the truth might still survive.
She was caught.
On October 20, 1943, the Gestapo kicked in her door. They took her to Pawiak Prison and demanded the list. When she refused, they smashed both her legs with iron bars. Then her feet. Then her arms. For weeks the beatings continued. She never spoke. They scheduled her execution. On the appointed morning, guards dragged the broken woman from her cell.
Instead of a firing squad, she found herself outside the prison walls—alive. The Polish underground council Żegota had bribed a guard to mark her file “shot while trying to escape.” Officially dead, Irena Sendler limped back into the shadows to keep working.When the war finally ended, the first thing she did was dig up the jars under the apple tree. She spent years trying to return the children—now scattered across convents, farms, and foster homes—to whatever family might remain.
Almost no parents had survived. But the children had. Because of her, 2,500 Jewish boys and girls lived to grow up, to marry, to have children and grandchildren of their own—an entire secret branch of the human family tree that the Nazis never managed to cut down.For decades her story stayed buried deeper than the jars themselves. Then, in 1999, four high-school girls in rural Kansas stumbled across a brief mention of her name. They found the old woman still living quietly in Warsaw and brought her courage back into the light.
Journalists called her the greatest rescuer of the Holocaust. Irena only shook her head.“I could have saved more,” she said. “That regret follows me to the grave.”Irena Sendler—armed with nothing but a ghetto work permit, a toolbox, and a refusal to look away—proved that even in the heart of the worst evil humanity has ever devised, one determined person can still keep the darkness from winning completely.
