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The Clark Family, Part 2
I was a bit nervous the week before my family’s 4th of July reunion. If I’m being honest, I got so nervous at one point that I had a hard time sleeping. It’s not a new feeling for me. Much of early widowhood (at least a year and a half!) was filled with sleepless nights, and just after I felt like I was really settling into life as a young widow, the pandemic hit. But this recent sleeplessness was not because of the pandemic – everyone in my family who could be vaccinated had been, and we took all the precautions we could for the little ones. Rather, my sleeplessness…
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What Happens to My Body When I Die?
It was dinnertime on Father’s Day this year when Claire looked at me and said, “wait, we didn’t go to the cemetery today!” She didn’t look upset, just surprised. Didn’t we always go to the cemetery on Father’s Day? In fact, we haven’t always done that. The very first Father’s Day I celebrated without Shawn, we went to the toy store and the local diner and the pool. I wanted to make sure it felt like a fun day for the kids, and for me. While we went in 2019 and 2020, this year we all wanted to celebrate Chris, and though we spent time remembering Shawn, we didn’t go…
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What Are You? (Father’s Day, 2021)
Below is a post that was written by my partner, Chris. While I wish he would write more often, he feels that this blog is mine and so he usually wants to stay in the background. But I managed to convince him to write something recently, and it struck me as a perfect great Father’s Day post. It’s about love, loss and what it means to become a father. Those of you who know Marjorie, know that she is nothing if not direct. Never one to shy away from offering her opinion, I’ll often find myself on the receiving end of a talk-shouted “That’s dumb. Don’t do that” from across…
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Mother’s Day, Year 4
When Claire was a few hours old, and we were finally alone, I held her in my arms and lifted her tiny face right next to mine. I whispered all sorts of things to her about how I would always love her and how I was going to do anything to make her life the best one it could be. I also told her that I would not repeat the mistakes of my mother. It was a silly thing to do, since she was an infant who didn’t even know that she had fingers and toes, and thus could not understand the nuances of a mother-daughter relationship. Plus, it wasn’t…
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Just Like Your Dad
Everyone says you look like your father. It’s true, Austin. Photos of Shawn at your age show not just a resemblance, but an image so similar I almost always have a moment when I think it’s a photo of you. The the shape of your eyes and the way that you smile and the size of your head and so many other features about you look just like every photo I’ve ever seen of him. Even the way that you hold a pencil is similar, as is the look in your eyes when you focus. Maybe this is why when he died, I worried the most about you. You were…
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Death by Pork Butt
I told myself I couldn’t freak out until 10 pm. I had been worried for the past hour, but I tried to rationalize it. Everything was fine. It wasn’t really that late. But then 10 pm arrived, and I let myself get really worried. Where was Chris? He’d been over at his sister’s house that evening, sitting around the fire and chatting with his brother-in-law, Josh. A few friends and neighbors dropped by to say congratulations on our engagement, and Josh was smoking a pork butt in his new smoker. Chris had let me know that things were behind schedule, as the pork butt was taking much longer to cook…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
