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What Brought You to The Hospital Today?
In 1971, when my father was a young medical student, he was working with patients at a county hospital in Houston. One day, a woman came in complaining of swollen feet and my dad was in charge of figuring out what was wrong with her. “So,” my dad began, “what brought you to the hospital today?” The woman looked right at him and said, “the bus.” She was not trying to be a smart-ass. She was merely answering my dad’s question. So he tried again. “Well, why did you come to the hospital?” “My feet are swollen,” she said. “Any other problems?” he asked. “Nope,” she replied. He was a…
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Mysterious
“Wait, let me get this straight,” the man running next to me said with wide-eyes, “you’ve lived in DC for fifteen years and you don’t know anything about our running group and you’ve never heard of Kelly’s Bar or any other bar around here?” I smiled. It was my first time with this new running group, and I wasn’t divulging much about my life, though he was trying to figure me out. “Yes, I guess that’s all true,” I said. “Who are you?” he said, laughing at me a bit, but also genuinely curious. “I’m just a runner,” I said, “though I’ve got a somewhat interesting backstory I’ll tell you…
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I Keep Running
I run almost every day. This is a relatively new thing for me – when Shawn was alive, I did a lot of walking, and I went to the gym a few times a week. But I wasn’t a consistent runner. Shawn was religious about his workouts. He did CrossFit all the time and ran on the days when he wasn’t at the gym. He went through a period of time when we were both in our early 30s when he wasn’t working out at all. But he woke up one morning in his late 30s and told me that he had gained too much weight and he was going…
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Speed Dating
“Are you all planning on wearing your wedding rings?” It was an innocent question coming from a friend of mine, another young widow named Alexi. In a few hours, we were slated to meet up with a few other young widows for a night on the town. We discussed the issue at length, eventually deciding that wearing a ring at a dating event would be pretty weird. Especially because we’d have little time to explain our complicated histories, as we were going speed dating. Yes, speed dating. Believe it or not, it still exists. Invented almost 20 years ago by a rabbi, speed dating is exactly what you think it…
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The Warmth of Home
Every day during the week leading up to Thanksgiving, Tommy asked me, “is it time to go to the grandparents’ house yet?” He’s too little to understand the days of the week, so I’d just tell him how many more days there were to go until we left on our trip. But he was so excited that he’d forget the next morning, and ask me again. One morning, when I told him there were still two more days to go and that he needed to be patient, he laughed a little bit and said, “I’m just so excited to go to the grandparents’ house!” The thing was, we weren’t actually…
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My Body Knew
I sat in front of the fire, not because the wind was whipping the tree branches side-to-side, and not because the ice had started to cling to my car windshield over the past week. It was cold, to be sure, but the inside of our house was warm on that November night. Still, I shook. Confused, I put my face close to the flames, hopeful that it would stop the involuntary shaking that had taken over my body. Shawn was upstairs, finally asleep. I had held his hand and pretended to sleep as I waited for his grip to loosen mine, so that I’d know that he was unconscious. He…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
