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What is Family?
I’ve always had a pretty expansive understanding of family. As a young child, I lived with my extended family in Texas for a number of months while my mother recovered from her first terrible bout with depression. I was young – just three – so I don’t remember all of the details, but I do know that I was loved deeply by everyone there. We spent many more summers down in Texas throughout my childhood, and I always thought of my family there as more than “extended.” Maybe it was because my mom wasn’t always well, but I learned to think about family with a broad lens as I grew…
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What Kind of Beer Do I Like?
Shawn loved beer. He always claimed it was a Canadian thing. “We drink beer!” he’d say when I asked him about why he was requesting a Coors Light at an afternoon barbecue. I got him interested in the Oregon wine my dad shipped us every year, and every once in a blue moon, he’d order a mixed drink at a bar. But really, Shawn loved beer. His tastes were not high brow. He mostly liked cheap beer (see aforementioned Coors Light) and other light beers. One of his favorite beers was a shandy, which is basically beer mixed with lemonade. On the first nice day of spring, he’d go to…
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Cowboy Take Me Away
I’ve been listening to The Chicks a lot lately. I like their new album and I’ve been remembering back to when I re-discovered them in the fall of 2018. At the time, I was starting to re-discover a lot of things about myself, and the song “Cowboy Take Me Away” made me reflect on how I was struggling with men. I decided to write a blog post about it. Here’s an excerpt (from “Smash the Patriarchy,” November 14, 2018): When I heard the song the other day, I sang along, and I felt that same emotion – a yearning for something else. But it wasn’t particularly for a new lover.…
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Letter to Myself: 1 Year (Part 3 of 3)
(In this series, I write letters to myself at three different time periods: 1 month after Shawn died, 6 months after Shawn died, and a year after Shawn died. This is what I wish I could have known.) Hi you. How’s it going? You hanging in there? I know. The 1-year marker is terrible. The anticipation may have been worse than the actual day, but the actual day is pretty rough too. I know you’ve spent weeks re-living every moment of the year prior. Did you ease his pain sufficiently? Did you tell him you loved him with enough conviction? Did you make the last days of his life good…
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Letter to Myself: 6 Months (part 2 of 3)
(In this series, I write letters to myself at three different time periods: 1 month after Shawn died, 6 months after Shawn died, and a year after Shawn died. This is what I wish I could have known.) Me again. Well, here you are: the 6-month mark. You’ve made it past that terrible, terrible time between month 4 and month 6. Those two months were when the reality of losing Shawn hit and you couldn’t bear the days without him. You kept going. You got through it. You got here. But what is here? What is the future? What are you supposed to do now? It’s the not-knowing that’s so…
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Letter to Myself: 1 Month (part 1 of 3)
(In this series, I write letters to myself at three different time periods: 1 month after Shawn died, 6 months after Shawn died, and a year after Shawn died. This is what I wish I could have known.) Hey – it’s me. Yes, it’s your future self, the person you’ll be two-and-a-half years from now. No, I cannot tell you everything about your future. But I’d like to talk to you a little bit about how things are going right now. It still doesn’t seem real, does it? Shawn was just alive. He was at Austin’s baseball game just a few months ago in November, but he’s missing all of…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
