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Ask a Widow: Therapy and Grief
Back in the early days of this blog, I spent a lot of time talking about therapy – therapy from my friends, therapy at my church, therapy with my widow friends, alternative therapies, and the therapy that I liked the best. Therapy was just a part of my life. But it wasn’t always effective. In fact, a lot of times when I went to traditional therapy – i.e. one-on-one therapy with a licensed professional – I left feeling….like it just didn’t do much for me. Maybe this is why I saw like 8 or 9 (or more?) therapists in the first year and a half after Shawn died. Or maybe…
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Accompany Me
About a week before the anniversary of Shawn’s death this year, I sat by the fire with Chris and started talking about what it was like to watch someone die. I’m not sure why I wanted to tell him. He’s heard it all before and we talk sometimes about how I’ve processed Shawn’s death. But it wasn’t that I needed him to know more details. It was that I simply wanted to tell the story to someone again. I wanted – maybe even needed – to process it once more. And so he listened. He let me talk and asked me a few questions. But mostly I just remembered what…
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The President We Need
I have never met Joe Biden, but since I live in DC, I know a lot of people who have. And they all say the same thing: he may not be a perfect man, but he is genuine in his warmth towards others. It’s not an act. He reaches out in many ways, but he’s most likely to do that when he sees someone suffering. Especially if that person is grieving. Biden knows grief. As we all know, his first wife and infant daughter were killed when he had just been elected to the Senate, in 1972. Yes, he went on to have an incredible political career. He remarried. But…
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Must Read This Week: Jamie Raskin
I’ve had a number of people write me over the past week and ask how my family is doing. (We are fine.) It’s been a long week for everyone living in DC. It’s been a long year for everyone in DC. Hell, it’s been a long year for everyone, everywhere – and it’s been longer still for those who’ve suffered illness and job loss and racism and grief. I think I can say one thing: 2021 already feels pretty exhausting. For our family, it’s also exhausting because we started this year as we start every year: by remembering when Shawn left this earth. Just a few days after the horror…
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Three Years
It took Shawn an entire day to die. I laid next to him as he came in and out of this world, holding my hand and squeezing it when he could. Of course, it took him longer than a single day to die. He had been dying for weeks, and we knew for days that the end was very near. But he was always cognitively aware until the very last day of his life. That day, he was more out of this life than he was in it. I knew that he was going to die that day, or sometime very soon. The doctors told me. The nurses told me.…
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2020, It’s Time to Go… (Part 1 of 2)
It’s time to go, 2020. It’s time to go, face masks and hand sanitizer and six feet of social distance. Not right away, I know. But soon, I hope. Soon. It’s time to go, waking up at 3 am. It’s time to go, guilt and anxiety. Or at least the really bad guilt and anxiety that comes after tragic loss. I’m healing now, so I really just have space for regular guilt and anxiety. It’s time to go, online dating. It’s time to go, nightmares. I know I also said this last year (and the year before that), but those really terrible ones? For real, no more nightmares, please. It’s…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
