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He Pushed the Button
The call came out over the loudspeaker. “If there’s a physician on the plane, can you please press your call button?” My dad put down his book and pressed the button. The flight attendant came over. “Are you a doctor?” she asked. “I am,” he said. She told him he was needed in the front, and he followed her up there. My dad was en route to Texas for a week-long break. He was going to play golf with his brother and his friends. He would also get to see our extended family. He’d spent the past two months caring for my kids without so much as a glimpse at…
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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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Fleetwood Mac
My dad loves music. Growing up, he had these massive speakers in our living room, and when my mom was out of the house, he’d crank them up so high that the floor would shake. He loves classic rock, and so I spent my childhood listening to the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Eagles, among many others. As a kid, I didn’t fully appreciate that my dad was “cool” in this realm because, well, he was my dad. But I remember in the early days of my friendship with Shawn, he was impressed by my ability to sing along to every word of a number of classic rock…
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Backsliding Into Grief
“Shawn used to order the craziest pizza toppings,” someone said with a smile. “He loved the ‘meat classic’ and anything else that had meat on top of meat,” I said, and everyone laughed. I was smiling remembering his ridiculous pizza orders for our group of friends. And then I was crying. Sobbing, really. “I miss him so much,” I kept saying as I continued to cry for what felt like a really long time. Everyone was comforting. I was beside myself. I don’t know how to fully put this down on paper, but at that moment I felt just as sad as I had in the weeks immediately after Shawn…
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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
