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Three Years
It took Shawn an entire day to die. I laid next to him as he came in and out of this world, holding my hand and squeezing it when he could. Of course, it took him longer than a single day to die. He had been dying for weeks, and we knew for days that the end was very near. But he was always cognitively aware until the very last day of his life. That day, he was more out of this life than he was in it. I knew that he was going to die that day, or sometime very soon. The doctors told me. The nurses told me.…
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Letter to Myself: 6 Months (part 2 of 3)
(In this series, I write letters to myself at three different time periods: 1 month after Shawn died, 6 months after Shawn died, and a year after Shawn died. This is what I wish I could have known.) Me again. Well, here you are: the 6-month mark. You’ve made it past that terrible, terrible time between month 4 and month 6. Those two months were when the reality of losing Shawn hit and you couldn’t bear the days without him. You kept going. You got through it. You got here. But what is here? What is the future? What are you supposed to do now? It’s the not-knowing that’s so…
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Letter to Myself: 1 Month (part 1 of 3)
(In this series, I write letters to myself at three different time periods: 1 month after Shawn died, 6 months after Shawn died, and a year after Shawn died. This is what I wish I could have known.) Hey – it’s me. Yes, it’s your future self, the person you’ll be two-and-a-half years from now. No, I cannot tell you everything about your future. But I’d like to talk to you a little bit about how things are going right now. It still doesn’t seem real, does it? Shawn was just alive. He was at Austin’s baseball game just a few months ago in November, but he’s missing all of…
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Highs and Lows
Every night at dinner, we go around the table and share our highs and lows. Usually, Claire’s highs revolve around some sort of fun activity (“baking cakes with mom!”) and Austin’s highs are often about the food we are eating (he is my child who really loves my cooking, bless him.) Tommy is more of a wild card. With less ability to carefully reflect on his day, he often copies Austin or says something nonsensical. But over the past week he’s had a theme: his father. Tommy still calls Shawn by his name, something I’ve tried long and hard to change but I’ve come to accept. The thing is, Tommy…
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Father’s Day, Year 3
I try not to look at social media on Father’s Day. I know I’m not alone. A lot of widows purposefully avoid social media on these fraught days – and there are many fraught days. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving…the list could go on. Because here’s the thing about social media on days that are celebratory: people post photos of their smiling and (usually) intact families. They sing the praises of the fathers in their children’s lives. This is great, and yet it is all a brutal reminder to me that my own family does not look like it once did. Father’s Day is probably the hardest…
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Second, As In Again
For over a decade, there was one photo that always hung in Shawn’s office. In it, he cradles me in his arms, my white wedding dress draped over his body. Our heads touch at our temples. We are beaming. It is one of my favorite photos, rivaled only by a few I have of my children. When Shawn died, I moved the photo to a special bookshelf in the basement bedroom, right above where the kids kept their board games. I wanted them to see it every day and know that there had once been a great love story in their house. Often when I’d go to the basement to…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
