Still Standing: A Hybrid Memoir

Still Standing is a lyrical, unflinching memoir about survival, grief, identity, motherhood, and the slow return to oneself. Rooted in Ojibwe family, land, and memory, it follows a nurse and mother as she confronts the wounds of a violent childhood, the losses that continue to shape her, and the parts of herself she was taught to hide. Raised within the love of grandparents, cousins, woods, lilacs, and Lake Country, she also learned early how to read danger in a room-to become quiet, useful, watchful, and strong. As an adult, she carries that vigilance into nursing, where she witnesses illness, addiction, death, and the fragile acts of care that hold people together when medicine cannot fix what is broken. When her beloved grandfather dies in the ICU where she works, she must become both the nurse who understands what the monitors mean and the granddaughter whose safest person is slipping away. Through braided prose, poetry, family stories, and intimate reflections, Still Standing explores generational trauma, cultural erasure, complicated grief, and the cost of always being "the strong one." It is also a story of reclamation: growing her hair long again, learning to braid and bead, returning to the teachings of water, land, kinship, and the Seven Grandfather Teachings, and choosing to create warmth for her children rather than pass pain forward. Tender, fierce, and deeply humane, Still Standing is for readers of trauma memoirs, Indigenous literature, nursing narratives, and stories of women rebuilding a life after survival. It asks what it means to carry the dead, to live with a body that remembers, and to keep choosing softness in a world that taught you to harden.