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From the Archives: Who Do You Want Raising Your Grandkids?
One morning as I ate the breakfast of eggs my dad had just made for me, I watched him go about his work in the kitchen. He was cleaning up the dishes from the kids and then he wiped Tommy’s mouth with the blue sponge from the sink. I thought about how readily he’d moved in with us after Shawn’s death. For a long time, I’d just accepted the decision as a normal one. But I also knew it couldn’t have been an easy one to make. At that point, he’d been living with us for almost a year. I watched him take a long swipe of the counter with…
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From the Archives: Baths and Bedtime with Grandpa Tom
We never really talked about how long my dad was going to stay, but weeks turned into months, and there he continued to be. After dinner in the evenings, we cleaned up and then we all went upstairs to get ready for bed. It had always been my routine with the kids and my dad joined me without comment immediately after Shawn died and we were home together. Most nights, my dad bathed Tommy and I supervised showers with the older kids. “Only three toys,” I heard him say one night. I came in to find Tommy deciding which bath toys he was going to bring in the tub, picking…
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From the Archives: You Are Making Meaning Already
About a year after Shawn died, I had a short but passionate relationship with a man I’ll call Derek. It ended badly. I didn’t want to admit to most of my friends that the breakup hit me really hard. I told them that I wasn’t sure why I was down, but that I seemed to be experiencing new grief. Really, the original misery over losing Shawn had never gone away. But my relationship with Derek had tamped that grief down, had made it smooth around the edges, encapsulated in a vessel that I could hold and manage. Somehow, our breakup had broken that vessel and the grief spilled out everywhere.…
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From the Archives: It’s Hard for People Who Don’t Know the Whole Story
Fall seemed too quick the year Shawn died, though maybe it was better that way. I didn’t want to spend the whole season reliving his illness. Instead, I spent a lot of time writing in the safety and warmth of my bedroom, though I also found refuge in my kitchen after the kids’ bedtime. I still wasn’t cooking much, but I could brew a cup of tea and eat a bowl of chocolate chips and feel like I was getting some sort of treat. One night, when I was up finishing a blog post about my life just after my mom died, my dad came downstairs. “You writing?” he asked…
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From the Archives: A Walk With My Dad
That summer after Shawn died, we all traveled to Texas for our annual family reunion at my aunt Nancy’s house. It was a place my dad loved, even in the sweltering summers, as it had been his home for his entire childhood and young adulthood. It was a place where it was so hot we sometimes tried to fry eggs on the sidewalk, a place where cacti dotted every front yard and the place where he had met and fallen in love with my mom. My parents originally met on a double date, though they weren’t matched with each other that night. They went out a few times after that,…
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From the Archives: You’re Doing the Hard Stuff
One of the first things my dad did when he moved in with us was to take over the breakfast duties. He was not a chef, but his eggs were always perfectly fried, and every morning he met me in the kitchen as the sun was rising and said, “ready for breakfast?” I ate little at that time, but I said yes, more because I wanted to remember what it felt like to sit with him as the day began. His movements in my kitchen reminded me exactly of the way he’d inhabited our kitchen back in Oregon, slamming the cabinets just a bit harder than was needed and jangling…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
