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My Babies Are Here With Me
“Thank God my Dad is almost home,” I texted a friend late Wednesday night. A part of me had been worried that we overreacted when we decided he should leave DC and return to rural Oregon. But then Wednesday night happened, and I was sure that I’d made the right call. No travel to Europe. The NBA suspends its season. Tom Hanks has coronavirus. My phone lit up so many times in the hour after I put my boys to bed, I almost couldn’t process it. I knew I had to remain calm, but nothing about the past 48 hours had felt calm. My school was closed for cleaning and…
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I’m Still Alive!
It was Monday morning last week when I started to really worry. I was back at work after a week off and my dad was really sick. “How are you feeling?” I asked. “I’m still alive!” he texted back. At least I knew he still had his sense of humor. But my dad was really sick. He claimed he’d just gotten a virus, but he was so lethargic it was worrying me. Needless to say, I don’t do well with debilitating illness anymore. And neither does anyone in my family. Claire and Austin had been asking me about Grandpa Tom ever since our return from vacation. “Is he okay?” Austin…
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Disaster Prep and the Coronavirus
When Shawn was alive, we always had a disaster plan. We designated a place that we would meet outside the city if we had to escape, we had canned goods and backpacks of supplies, and we owned a damn generator. I mean, we were ready. But really, I wasn’t ready at all. I was just married to Shawn, and he was a tiny bit obsessed with the idea of an impending apocalypse. Usually, he brought it up in a semi-joking way, talking about the zombie apocalypse or something similarly silly. But sometimes – like when he got an inside look at some type of government planning in case of a…
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Table for Seven
The other night, I was getting ready to go out to dinner with my friends when I got a text. “Do you want to take a cab with us?” “Yes!” I replied. I was standing in my bathroom and Claire was chatting with me about her day. “Isn’t it nice that someone thought about me and asked me to go in the cab with them to dinner?” I said. “That is nice!” she said. “Who are you going to dinner with?” I listed off three couples, noting that I felt lucky that these couples wanted to include me, even though I was coming by myself. “Usually I just go out…
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Emergency Contact
So I’m in the middle of filling out camp forms for my kids. Yes, I know that in the rest of the country, you all sign up for summer camp in April or May. But this is DC, so our camps are all filled with the children of Type-A+ personalities, which means that camp registration for August begins in January. My kids are going to one camp at a place that they’ve frequented for many years. For that camp, my information is saved in their computer system. As I got to the contact sheets, I noticed that Shawn’s name was still filled in under “Emergency contact sheet: Parent 2.” I…
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What About the Privilege?
The thing about being a writer is that – shockingly! – not everyone is going to like everything that you write. Sometimes people write me privately and sometimes they comment on my blog. Almost always, I let negative comments on my blog stay, because it’s important that I hear other people’s opinions, especially other widows. (I do delete vitriolic comments, because no one needs that.) Anyway, I wrote this post a few days ago about tough love, thinking that I was being thought-provoking about how to treat people who are in the early days of grieving. I talked about all of the support I had received, which I’ve documented on…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
