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I Am From
A few weeks ago, Austin came downstairs and wanted my help editing a poem he wrote. “It’s for school,” he said. Their class had read the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon and he was supposed to write his story – the story of his life – in a similar style. The kids were all working on a shared document, so we could see what his classmates had written. As you may imagine, there was a lot of discussion of favorite sports and playing with siblings and other fourth grade interests. On the first line, Austin had written a bit about being from “mom and dad,” but he…
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Guilt (Part 2)
The notes from my widowed readers came in pieces over the past few months, but together, they read something like this: I am so happy that you have found your second love, Chris. You seem really happy! I also recently found someone new, and for the first time in a long time, I feel alive again. But here’s my question: does this feeling (of being alive and in love) make you also feel guilty? I have a simple answer for that: no. (But also, I do still feel guilt sometimes.) I guess this needs some explanation. In fact, I’ve been thinking about guilt a lot lately. So much of 2018…
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So Then Who Are You?
A few nights ago, Tommy woke me up. “There’s something in my room!” he said, eyes wide. “There’s nothing in your room,” I said. “Let’s go back to sleep.” He wasn’t consoled, and as I tucked him back in he said, “listen! There’s scratching in the walls!” He was right. I told him that it was probably just a tree branch, but I knew otherwise. It was a mouse – or something worse – crawling around inside the walls of our house. “You have to call the pest company tomorrow,” I said to Chris as I crawled back into bed. “I’m teaching all day and this needs to be taken…
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Death by Pork Butt
I told myself I couldn’t freak out until 10 pm. I had been worried for the past hour, but I tried to rationalize it. Everything was fine. It wasn’t really that late. But then 10 pm arrived, and I let myself get really worried. Where was Chris? He’d been over at his sister’s house that evening, sitting around the fire and chatting with his brother-in-law, Josh. A few friends and neighbors dropped by to say congratulations on our engagement, and Josh was smoking a pork butt in his new smoker. Chris had let me know that things were behind schedule, as the pork butt was taking much longer to cook…
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Holiday Cards (Part 2)
As we put our holiday card together last month, Chris and I debated what to write on the back. We’d already decided to put “all you need is love” on the front, but we recognized that there were going to be some people who would be super confused when they got our card. For my friends, who was this new guy on the front? And (maybe even more confusing) for Chris’s friends, who was this woman and these three kids with him? So, on the back we wrote the following: Not sure who one (or four) of the people on this card are? Drop us a line. We can talk…
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Accompany Me
About a week before the anniversary of Shawn’s death this year, I sat by the fire with Chris and started talking about what it was like to watch someone die. I’m not sure why I wanted to tell him. He’s heard it all before and we talk sometimes about how I’ve processed Shawn’s death. But it wasn’t that I needed him to know more details. It was that I simply wanted to tell the story to someone again. I wanted – maybe even needed – to process it once more. And so he listened. He let me talk and asked me a few questions. But mostly I just remembered what…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
