Tag: grief
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Like It Just Wanted to Sleep
The first Christmas after my mom died, my dad called hysterical because the tree had fallen over. I drove over with my three little ones, and when I walked into the entryway, there it was. The Christmas tree, lying flat across the living room floor, ornaments and all, like it just wanted to sleep. Like…
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Without her
My mother died at sixty. My kids were six, four, and two. What came next, in order: a divorce, single motherhood. And about nine months after we lost her, my father moved away. There was still some family, technically. But asking the few who remained came at a cost, one way or another, in ways…
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It Waited for Me
My therapist told me recently that the reason I’m only now processing all of this, decades after it happened, is that it’s finally feeling safe enough to. I’ve turned that over a lot since she said it, because it explains something I couldn’t explain to myself: why now. Why, twenty and thirty years after the…
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Chat Rooms and Candles
In 2004, there was one other person. I was young and sick and more alone in it than I have ever been able to fully describe. Nobody my age understood. Nobody my age was going through it. I’ve written about how apart I felt in those years, the young cancer patient among peers who were…
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Disneyland
For a long time, Disneyland was a promise that lived in someone else’s mouth. Their father would take them for the weekend, and he’d tell them that this time, soon, we’ll go. Then they’d come home to me, and I’d be the one holding them while the promise dissolved again. I got good at that…
