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From the Archives: Look Good in the ER
Looking at my sister is like looking in the mirror. The shape of her eyes, drawn down just a bit on the ends, and the curve of her mouth when she smiles are just two of the many physical similarities we share. As a kid, it grated on me that people thought we were twins. “I’m older,” I’d reply, indignantly. But we were always close, joined together by love and also by the difficulties of growing up in a house with a very ill parent. When our mom died, we grieved together even if we didn’t know exactly how to go about it. I’d been away at college for much…
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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: The Mindfulness and Grief Therapy Session
I spent a lot of the first half of 2018 looking for something to ease the strain in my chest, a pain that was obviously due to my mental state and yet also had a physical component. One night, I had my dad listen to my heart with his stethoscope, because it felt so out-of-whack. “You’re okay,” my dad said, though I knew he was only talking about my pulse and not the emotion that had caused me to wake him up so he could reassure me that I wasn’t having a heart attack. If I could have just taken a pill and made the pain dissolve, I would have…
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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…
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From the Archives: I Just Remembered That It’s All Real
“None of my clothes fit,” I said one morning as I stripped off the jeans that gaped at my waist. It had been a week since Shawn died and more than six weeks since I had eaten a normal meal. Kelly and Paige both sat on the edge of my bed, watching me throw clothes out of my closet. They were still staying with me, helping me get through the terrible tasks that followed the funeral. We’d come upstairs in the hope that I could clean out Shawn’s closet, but I felt overwhelmed after taking just one flannel shirt off of a hanger. “This can wait,” Kelly said, and I…
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From the Archives: Kelly and Paige
Two years after my mom died, I met my two best friends, Kelly and Paige, at the UCLA family camp in the San Bernardino Mountains where we all worked in the summer before we graduated. Kelly made french fries at the sandwich shop and Paige ran the art center and I organized games for elementary school kids. We all lived together with a few dozen other college kids in a dorm with walls so thin we could hear every word of each other’s conversations, even with the doors closed. “Someone is making out next door to me, but I’m not sure who!” I’d scream-whisper to one of them in the…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
