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Asparagus Cures Cancer
A few weeks ago, I got a private message on my blog. It was a letter from a reader who wanted me to know that she had used a special herbal remedy to cure her sister’s cancer, and it had worked. She implored me to spread the word about this herbal remedy since my own husband had died of cancer. Well, DAMN, I thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Herbs! I even have my own garden. And I actually grow herbs! Why didn’t I get Shawn to eat more of them? I posted this to Twitter and got a lot of responses. Oh, yes, there are many things other…
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“It Hurt for Me”
I see my therapist once a week. We talk about my life and how to reframe things that are difficult for me. I like my therapist. But an hour a week is really not enough to help me. I think I’d probably need to see her every single day for the amount of therapy I need. Since I can’t do that, I often end up relying on my friends. Last week, I had a particularly difficult day. I think it was because I was thinking a lot about Mother’s Day (why are holidays still SO difficult?) and trying to deal with the logistics of school winding down. It was just…
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You Are Alone. Accept That. Carry On.
As I groped through the month of March, I tried a LOT of different things to feel better. I wrote. I ran. I talked to my friends. I drank wine. I cried. Sometimes I sobbed. I even texted my friends that I was thinking about following Michael Pollan’s experimentation with psychedelics. (My therapist friend Kelly responded with, “don’t do mushrooms! That’s a hard no.” I listened. Because, kids, you shouldn’t do illegal drugs to dull your pain. There are plenty of FDA-approved medicines that can help if that’s where you find yourself.) But before I get too far away from my key point here: March was terrible. (And yes, I…
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24 Hours
I wake with a start. The clock says 5:15 and Tommy is next to me. My anxiety kept me up last night for an hour or so, but at least it’s better than the previous week. The room is freezing because the HVAC hasn’t worked in a week. But I can’t worry about that because it’s time to run, eat, shower, get the kids ready and get out the door. I get to school early and meet with a student. “You need to craft topic sentences that connect back to your thesis,” I say, and show her how to do that. Then I’m off to teach about US-Chinese relations. I…
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It Might Not Happen For Me
I love podcasts. So did Shawn. We used to put them on in the morning to get caught up with the day’s news and we used to listen to really engaging ones in the evening together. One time when he was going through this big health kick, he made me listen to a multi-hour podcast on the dangers of sugar by a martial-arts expert. I rolled my eyes a lot at that one, but we ended up talking about it for days afterwards. For a while after Shawn died, I couldn’t listen to any of our old podcasts. I still liked listening to other people talk, but I switched to…
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Running to the Door
When Shawn and I met in Japan, he had a girlfriend back home in Canada. He liked her a lot, that was clear, and so we were just friends for the first year we knew each other. But eventually time and space meant that they broke up. “Why?” I asked him the night he told me. “I never called her,” he said. “When I finally called her yesterday, she cried and said I obviously didn’t care about her if I didn’t ever want to call her.” He paused, thinking about it. I can still remember his face – he was contemplating his own actions. “She’s probably right,” he said. “I…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
