Remembering Irena

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This website is dedicated to my mum, Irena Orniacka Chudoba, who passed away on May 30, 2023. It celebrates her kindness, creativity and wisdom.My mum was one of a kind. A strong, independent woman with a rare moral backbone, a ray of sunshine, a source of relentless optimism, a painter, a mentor, and a proud (and terrific) midwife who through 30 years, delivered and saved many lives. But above all, she was my mum and my best friend - someone completely irreplaceable, and so she deserves a page of her own.What to expect on this website?Photos, memories, Irena's favourite quotes and an occasional brain fart for me.Thanks for stopping by.

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Three Christmases

December 2025

This year I'm spending Christmas on my own. Various reasons. None particularly dramatic. But it doesn't feel solitary because she's still here. Just like that last Christmas three years ago when we were together."I feel so good at my child's place," she said.Some mothers have this irreplaceable quality of delivering profound truths, wrapped in plain declarative statements that carry the weight of continents crossed and lives rebuilt from scratch.She's subconsciously coded into everything I do or think.That's why this Christmas alone isn't absence but communion with the permanent version of her, the one who exists beyond time's cruelty, beyond physical presence, in every moment I choose substance over shallow bullshit.I want to believe she is quietly observing my life, home, and everyday choices. Knowing what I will say and do is exactly what she would advise me to do.So today, on my own but not alone, I'm raising a glass to the woman who made me formidable.Wesołych Świąt, Mama. You're here. Always.

Happy 72nd, Mama!

October 2025

Today, my Mum would have been 72.
The cultural script insists I should be "better" by now - that grief follows some tidy trajectory from devastation to acceptance, with pit stops at all the sanctioned emotional waypoints.That script is bullshit.Joan Didion lost her husband to a stroke at dinner, and then her daughter to long-term illness a year later. Every normal person would collapse within; many would need professional help or anti-depressants. She went into a writing frenzy and “literally, wrote herself back to sanity” as one of her critics described it.She wrote that grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We assume someone close to us could die, but we don't look beyond the few weeks that immediately follow. We imagine we'll be sad. We don't expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We don't expect to be literally deranged - keeping our loved one's shoes because they'll need them when they return.This is what actually happens: “Grief has no distance. It comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Then comes the unending absence, the void, the very opposite of meaning - a relentless succession of moments during which you confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”No one tells you this because it terrifies people who think they're immune.For Those Living As If They Were Immortal:
Robert McCrum, after his stroke at 42, wrote about those who operate as if death is optional: "This reminds anyone who has lived as if they were immortal that there are no privileges or exceptions. The remorseless passage of time and unwelcome intrusion of physical frailty must finally confront everyone with the same inevitable reckoning."Your turn is coming. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in forty years. The only question is whether you'll have learned to sit with discomfort before it arrives, or whether you'll be one of those people who can't handle being near grief because it forces you to acknowledge your own fragility.The cultural mythology people need to bin:
Grief is a problem requiring intervention rather than a process demanding space.The performative timeline: acceptable mourning periods dictated by social comfort levels
"Strength" is measured by how quickly you resume normal service
Isolation is framed as a dysfunction rather than a necessity.The relentless optimisation of pain - as if grief were just another inefficiency to be managed.Being alone isn't the problem.
The urge to isolate and withdraw is often looked down upon as if it were some kind of illness. It's pragmatism. Most people who haven't lived with grief, or who do not understand its nature, can't bear to sit with it. They'll tolerate your grief for a few weeks, maybe months.
Then comes the trivialisation - the subtle pressure to move on, the uncomfortable silences, the subject changes. Not because they're cruel. Because your pain makes them confront their own mortality, and humans are exquisitely designed to avoid that reckoning.Didion said the most helpful people were those who let her bring up her husband's death in the middle of dinner without trying to fix or redirect it. People are comfortable enough with death to let it exist in conversation. Those people are rare. She also remembered one friend who, every day for the first few weeks, brought her a container of scallion-and-ginger congee. No grand gestures. Just consistent, practical care when she couldn't think about food.The rest? They need you to be fine so they can be comfortable. That's not support, that's social maintenance.You do the work no one else can do for you. CS Lewis wrote about living each endless day in grief, but also living each day thinking about living each day in grief - this compounding self-awareness that makes it harder. You can't do that processing with someone hovering, asking if you're okay, offering solutions to a problem that has no solution.
Lewis had a phrase for this: "Alone into the Alone." The journey toward death, and death itself, is individual. You walk it solo. And how improbable that it should be otherwise.The truth no one wants to hear is that grief is lonely work. It happens to everyone, but you feel it alone.Two years on, you'll still be ambushed by it. The absence doesn't get smaller; you just learn to carry the weight differently. There's no timeline, and no "better." There's just learning to exist in a world that contains this permanent alteration.You need time away from the noise. From the well-meaning advice. From the expectation that you'll return to who you were. You won't. That person doesn't exist anymore.If you're early in grief, permit yourself to disappear. Avoid social media or crowded places. Tell people you need space without apologising for it. The ones who matter will understand. The ones who don't were never going to help, anyway.If someone close to you is grieving, let them talk about the dead person whenever it comes up. Don't try to distract them or cheer them up. Just be comfortable enough with death to let it sit at the table. Bring them food. Then leave.And if anyone tells you there's a right way to do this, they're lying. Grief is a long valley with no map. The only way out is through.My Mum taught me survival, not just in her life but in her loss. She'd have no patience for tidy narratives about healing. She'd tell me to feel it, face it, and keep moving when I could. That's what I'm doing. Two years on, and I'm still learning what that looks like.Happy birthday, Mum. The work continues.

The Grief Merchants: Business of Selling You Back Your Feelings

30 May 2025

It’s been two years since my mum passed, and no, it’s not getting any easier. I suppose it never will, and that’s fine.
Anyone who’s been mauled by grief after losing someone irreplaceable knows the terrain: the ups and downs, the sharp drops into dark, draining moments, and the occasional lift from nostalgia or some battered old photo that still smells faintly of home.Most people, most sane people, anyway, learn to live with grief. Not to “get over it” or “conquer” it, but to stop treating it like some emotional fungus to be scrubbed away. They carry it. It softens. It shifts. It stays.
But then, there are the others. The ones who, rather than sitting in the sadness, throw money at it. Thousands of them. Handing over their hard-earned cash to be told things they were going to learn anyway, by living, hurting, remembering, and healing on their own terms.Because where there’s pain, there’s profit. If you perform basic online research, you will discover an entire grief industry out there making a buck on vulnerability.
There’s a moment in grief’s aftermath where you’d buy anything just to feel something again. A meditation app. A guided journal. A grief balm blessed by a shaman named Todd. Into that raw, blurry space swoop the Grief Coaches™, equal parts life coach, influencer, and self-appointed soul sherpa.
These people don’t just want to help you process your pain. No, they want to monetise it.They want to monetise it for you. On your behalf. For a small (large) fee.
Let’s take a detour through the Global Grief Institute, an actual place that exists on the actual internet. For just $3,995, you too can become a "Certified Master Grief Coach." That’s five certifications for the price of one MBA module. You’ll learn to guide the bereaved through their darkest hours, presumably using laminated checklists and vague affirmations.
Or maybe you'd prefer a single session with a “grief expert” at $231 an hour. That’s less of a conversation and more of a hostage situation.
And if you want to really hit rock bottom, hire a motivational speaker who’s parlayed their personal tragedy into a $50,000 keynote. Because nothing says “healing” like a TED Talk with corporate sponsorship and a merch table.For the overwhelming majority of people, grief doesn’t need a business plan. It needs time and a breathing room. It needs cups of tea, awkward silences, angry walks, an ocean of tears and the slow, stubborn rebuilding of a world without the person you lost.
Sure, in the thick of it, common sense goes on holiday. You feel desperate. You’ll click anything that promises “10 Steps to Moving On” or “The Secret to Inner Peace After Loss” (spoiler: it’s always a course you can’t afford). But that desperation is the bait. The hook is the idea that someone else has the answers and will sell them to you.
They don’t. And they shouldn’t.Real grief isn’t a content funnel.
It’s not a scalable solution. It’s not a coaching niche. And it sure as hell shouldn’t be an upsell.Eventually, with time, and maybe a bit of therapy that isn’t led by someone who got their certification off Canva, you’ll come to realise the truth: the “answers” they’re selling were always inside you. You were just too raw to recognise them yet.No downloadable workbook can do what time, common sense, and a refusal to outsource your humanity can.
So next time someone offers to fix your grief for $300 an hour, consider this instead: save your money. Take a walk. Talk to someone who loves you, or find someone interesting who can shift your mindset into another territory (Sir David Attenborough or Adam Curtis do a great job for most).Heal like a person, not a product.
And if you really want to feel better fast? Block the grief coach. You’ll feel 30% lighter instantly.

Mother's Day

May 2025

Happy Mother's Day, Mama.
Wherever you are.
You were the best Mom one could have.
I love you.

Mom's favourite songs

April 2025

A non-exhaustive list of Mom's favourite tracks in no particular order.

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Things my Mom loved

March 2025

Vintage floral hand-painted plates and bowls from Wloclawek.Her kitchen walls flaunted a gallery of them, each piece pinned up like a badge of quiet triumph. It was a humble nook, cradled in farmhouse bones, clean and warm, boasting a wooden cabinet with chipped edges and full of soft light. I’d trade my last breath for five minutes there, perched at her table—a slab of wood that whispered welcome—stirring a pot for her, words spilling out like steam.We’d talk rivers dry, never scraping for scraps of chatter; the air was always thick with something worth saying.The safest place on earth is no more.

Best people don't come back

17 January 2025

"I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we’ll all meet again, like the song says. It’s sad but it’s not devastating if you think like that... We’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.” David LynchR.I.P.

Today is Irena's Day

1 Nov 2024

The word for missing someone and remembering them in Vietnamese is the same.It makes a lot of sense, as I can't separate missing my Mum from remembering her. There has not been a day I haven't thought about her and how much I miss her.Although life goes on, this shattering loss is flickering on the periphery, brushing up against every moment of joy or stillness, and wrapped up every time something exciting happens, I would like to immediately share with her over the phone.Some people never mention their mothers when with friends, ignore their calls, or avoid family events just to escape a tough conversation with them. Poor sods. They don't have a champion that cheers on every new step, job achievement or any minor minutiae of their lives.No one quietly and innocuously towers over them to provide assurance and support.Today, it's All Saints' Day in Poland. It's her day, although it is my tragic day, a day of the worst loss in my life. A day that flashes back to a massive trauma and when life became after her."A great soul serves everyone all the time. It never dies, and it brings us together all the time," said Maya Angelou.Today is Irena's day. Irena that had a tough life as a child living in a backward, impoverished countryside, having to work and take care of younger siblings, Irena who lived through a shit, abusive marriage until she broke free and blossomed, Irena who was passionate about her work and helping the weaker and vulnerable, Irena that was always there in the darkest hours to brighten my room, Irena that was the most creative person I have ever met, Irena that always found a solution to seemingly unsolvable problems, Irena that needed so little to be happy, Irena, the lover of art and the artist, Irena the tremendous mother many can only dream about.Now, I became one of those people.Irena who has shaped me and defined me.Thank you. I love you, Mum.

Looking doesn't mean seeing.

July 2024

Looking doesn't mean seeing.
If we knew how much time we waste loving those who don't deserve it, we would have made smarter choices. My mother made a wise choice by loving very few.I have made the same choice because human 'goodness' is situational and very often opportunistic. That may be why it's so hard to find a truly and genuinely good person. The world wouldn't be irreversibly fucked if there were more good people, would it?The grieving process sharpens your perception in such a way that you become particularly alert to both the good and the bad sides of human nature. You begin to make clear distinctions and contrasts between the two, as well as quickly picking up on the blatant hypocrisy of people who meticulously create a perfect public persona while embodying emptiness, selfishness and moral decay.Put simply, your ability to spot bullshit is tripled..The internet is a place where people seek affirmation, which leads to the immediate dismissal of posts like this that force them out of their comfort zone. But it does not change the fact that if you have lived long enough to try to give everyone a chance, and to maintain a naïve belief in the goodness of human nature despite the bile you have received from far too many, it may be time to acknowledge the sobering truth.Be wary of worshipping those who seek constant applause, attention and fame, for they have nothing of value to offer.The genuine heroes of this world are hidden. Mine are all gone." But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs".
George Elliott, Middlemarch"Nie ma nic gorszego dziecko, niz tepa mierzwa ktora szuka poklasku"
Wladyslaw Orniacki

It's been a year...

30 May 2024

...and it does not get any easier.I am gradually realising that those who view grief as a process of healing are complete idiots who lack profound emotions.Their ultimate goal is to immediately return to the naïve state of false security and an unachievable serene-mindedness affordable only to people who live in the state of denial, dogs, kids, or the mentally challenged.Their objective is not to help others affected by grief but to burden you with their self-righteous and pretentious Kumbaya to feel superior. Avoid "well-meaning", jovial morons like a plague. They will not understand, nor help you.Living with grief means never wanting to forget. This is an ironically beneficial situation because it means that you met someone more valuable than any other occurrence in your life. You will never meet such a person again, but you had them for some time, and they had you. And this is what matters.Love you always, Mom.