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From the Archives: You Are Making Meaning Already
About a year after Shawn died, I had a short but passionate relationship with a man I’ll call Derek. It ended badly. I didn’t want to admit to most of my friends that the breakup hit me really hard. I told them that I wasn’t sure why I was down, but that I seemed to be experiencing new grief. Really, the original misery over losing Shawn had never gone away. But my relationship with Derek had tamped that grief down, had made it smooth around the edges, encapsulated in a vessel that I could hold and manage. Somehow, our breakup had broken that vessel and the grief spilled out everywhere.…
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Any Day You Can Die
I was walking to my Spanish class the other day and out of the corner of my eye I saw a sticker on a post that was in English. I guess it grabbed my attention because I don’t see much in English in my daily life. Or maybe it’s because of what it said: Any Day You Can Die I stared at it for a minute, and then snapped a photo. Was it encouragement? A nihilistic viewpoint? A threat? A dose of reality for English speakers? Who knows! But I kept thinking about this sticker all day. A few nights later, we went out to dinner as a family. Out…
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From the Archives: My Mom’s Diary (Part 2 of 2)
The diary took me a long time to finish, but I read it all in one sitting. When I was done, I realized I had used almost all of the tabs. Each page was full of my notes, with arrows pointing to the margins where I’d written questions or tried to connect her thoughts. I came downstairs to my friends. “How did it go?” Michelle asked. She was on the couch, also writing, and Becky was across the room, fiddling with her camera. They both turned to face me. “It was…” I couldn’t find the right words. They waited for me to finish. “It was a lot.” “I’m sure it…
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From the Archives: My Mom’s Diary (Part 1 of 2)
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to face my mom’s diary. What was it going to tell me about who she had been? How might it change the memories I had of her? Was it even right to read someone else’s diary, even if she had left it for us to find? I knew I couldn’t do it at home. For some reason, I wanted to be away both from my kids and from my dad. It wasn’t just about the constant interruptions that happened at home, but rather more that I needed a clear head. Becky and Michelle offered to go away with me for…
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Thanks on Thanksgiving
I’m going to let you in on a secret. I’ve decided that it’s time to end the blog. Don’t worry – I’m not stopping right now! At this point, I don’t know exactly how I’m going to stop writing this blog. But for the past few months, I’ve been wrestling with whether it makes sense anymore for me to write about widowhood. The early, intense months of widowhood are now in the past for me, and even the big changes that occurred over the past 4 1/2 years – living with my dad, raising kids as a single mom, dating, falling in love, the pandemic, getting married and having Chris…
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From the Archives: It’s Hard for People Who Don’t Know the Whole Story
Fall seemed too quick the year Shawn died, though maybe it was better that way. I didn’t want to spend the whole season reliving his illness. Instead, I spent a lot of time writing in the safety and warmth of my bedroom, though I also found refuge in my kitchen after the kids’ bedtime. I still wasn’t cooking much, but I could brew a cup of tea and eat a bowl of chocolate chips and feel like I was getting some sort of treat. One night, when I was up finishing a blog post about my life just after my mom died, my dad came downstairs. “You writing?” he asked…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
