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From the Archives: Your Dad Died Last Night
The morning before Shawn died, my dad woke my children and got them ready for school. Claire sat at the kitchen counter and ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast while my dad wiped the kitchen counter. When she had gone to bed, both Shawn and I had still been in the house, and she was confused. My dad told her that we’d spent the night at the hospital. The house was quiet, and Claire didn’t say anything as she ate. She looked up after she finished, and with a furrowed brow asked my father, “Grandpa Tom, is Dad going to die?” He didn’t mince words. “Yes,” he said, “he…
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Let’s Make Light As a Family
The kids cried when we told them we were moving to Colombia. They didn’t want to leave their friends, their rooms, their toys and their extended family. They didn’t know Spanish and they didn’t know the culture of Colombia. They didn’t want to live in an apartment and they didn’t want to eat arepas for the next year. (They now love arepas.) But we had made a decision, and slowly, they all came around to it. We did offer one carrot – we promised them that once we got to Colombia and had been there for a month, we would all take a trip to the beach. A few weeks…
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From the Archives: That’s What We Have Right Now. Hope.
My dad arrived a week before Christmas. Initially, when Shawn was diagnosed, he’d offered to come in January for the duration of the chemotherapy. Shawn and I thought it would take about six months, and my dad could help our family until the worst was over. What we didn’t know was that my dad had different plans. After he saw the scans that were taken a few days before Shawn’s colonoscopy, he knew it was much worse than we realized. I didn’t know till later that he’d sat at his computer in his living room and held a printout of the scan, crying as he looked at it. My dad…
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Parent 2 (Part 2)
In the early days of widowhood, sometimes the smallest things would make me cry. In fact, I have a very vivid memory of sobbing the first time I filled out a form for one of the kids and realized that there was no father to go in the “Parent 2” slot. Obviously, I had to do this a number of times over the next few years, and it did get easier. I started writing “No Parent 2” in the slot, though sometimes I’d get auto-replies that said things like, “Hello Marjorie Brimley and No Parent 2!” I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. That fall after Shawn died, I…
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From the Archives: Marjorie, What If I’m Dying?
Throughout the past 4 1/2 years, I’ve written pieces that never appeared on the blog. Sometimes, these pieces of writing were too raw for me to share, and sometimes they were simply musings that I wasn’t sure were interesting for a bigger audience. Often, I wrote to process what had happened and to try and understand how my life had turned out the way it did. These writings went in a folder, and for the next few months, I plan to share some of them with you. I’m calling these posts, “From the Archives”. Here’s the first one. The pain in Shawn’s gut became obvious at the end of October,…
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Pico y Placa
I wake up early in Colombia. I’m not totally sure why, as the sun doesn’t come up any earlier than it did back home and the city isn’t that much louder than DC. But every morning, around 5 am, my eyes pop open and I am awake. It’s okay, this waking-up-early thing. I have always woken up early (though not quite as early as 5) so it’s not totally bizarre for me to be up before everyone else. Anyway, a few weeks into our time here in Colombia, I found myself awake in the wee hours of the morning, yet again. I figured I’d get up and make something special…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
