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What Would He Be Like?
My kids like to ask questions that surprise me. They’re much more curious about illness and death and things like guardianship papers than most other kids their age, so I’m used to tough questions. We talk about what happens when people die, how adults plan for death and what it means to die young. You’d think I’d be prepared for every question, and yet, they still continue to surprise me. The other day, we were sitting around the dinner table talking about what would happen to them if Chris and I died. (They really want the specifics. I get it. It’s a possibility they know exists in the world.) Chris…
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Just Like You
Claire made the volleyball team last month. To be quite honest, Chris and I were pretty surprised. Yes, she’s a decent athlete, but she’s never played volleyball before and there were many kids who tried out. On top of all this, her Spanish is pretty limited, and the coach doesn’t speak English. We don’t really know why she was picked, but she was elated. “I get to go to Cartagena!” she shouted, as she announced her team placement. Yep, this is what it meant that she made the team. At the end of the season, we would be sending her across Colombia. Without us. But that wasn’t the hard part,…
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His Smile
When we picked Tommy up from of overnight camp this summer, we noticed that his two front teeth had really come in. Just a week and his smile looked different! It looked just like Shawn’s. Claire and Austin once had the same teeth, but braces have straightened them. Shawn never had braces, and I always found his crooked smile endearing, though it was a bit out-of-place in polished Washington, DC. Still, it was a part of what made him who he was. And now Tommy was smiling just like him. We spent the next few weeks in a little cabin on the river, visiting Nana and Pop while we waited…
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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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We Will Not Look Away From You
The first weekend in May was extraordinarily monumental for our family. Or at least that was how it seemed in the weeks leading up to it. I’d looked forward to this weekend for months. We’d sent out invitations and picked out outfits and planned for lots of fun. Nana and Pop would be coming down, too. I was ready for two big events: our adoption party on Saturday, and Rite 13, the coming-of-age ceremony for Claire at our church, on Sunday. Saturday morning we got up early and my mind was already spinning. I needed to clean the bathrooms and order pizza and organize who would be at Austin’s baseball…
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When Auto-Fill Won’t Cut It
I’ve filled out so many forms in my life. That’s part of being an adult, I suppose. But the form-filling-out got way more intense when I became a widow. When Shawn died, I seemed to need a new form for every single account I had everywhere. Sure, that made sense at the bank, but it seemed crazy to me that I needed a needed to fill out a new form (declaring my newly widowed status) for the internet company, among many others. But the worst kinds of forms were the ones I didn’t have to totally re-do. The worst kinds of forms were the drop-down menus that I had to…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
