Author Archives

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the age of deaths

Had a great dinner with friend EC tonight. He’s been thinking of friends dying, how it’ll start to be, now that he’s of an age.  We shared stories of fathers’ passing. Very different ones, with some common elements.  What is grief, but the disbelief of a permanent and painful absence.  That’s our common experience.

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Dad on lap

Heavy box of Dad’s cremains, cloaked in a burgundy velvet bag, on my lap. Reassuringly heavy. Look up in corner of room at a still spider. Is that you, Dad? How do you see us?  Can you see all of us, all the time?  Can you zone out?  Why would you care about our minutiae anymore?  Or do you just know it all, all the time?

Reed said his dad died on December 27th. Is it contagious?

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Missing Rosie

Five days with no overly emotive days, then crying on the plane home. Strange pains in both breasts. Hormonal cycles triggering something? Sympathy pains in Lulu for Rosie? Will I really look down and see a chunk of her gone in a few days? I’be been looking at myself in the mirror with both arms overhead, admiring their perfect size, shape, symmetry. How familiar the picture and how familiar the flesh.

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Cancer Anger and Frustration

The diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma came on Wednesday May 4. I’ll live to tell the story and become a survivor, but I don’t know the path. I’m angry and sad and hurt. My body has betrayed me. I let myself become overwhelmed with stress in the last year and this is one outcome. I want to turn back time. Was this always an outcome?

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Needy Son

I’m a total sucker for the panicky phone calls during which son explains what he has forgotten and desperately needs.  Right now. I have left the office and driven home/school to drop off permission slips, shiny Dingle shoes for marching band performances, large boxes of granola bars, signed acknowledgements of test results and homework completed, and boxes of straws for science club experiments. I know I enable. I just have a hard time saying no to him/them. In part because they are trying hard, and they are good students, and they are children.

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daily music

E and J played in a competition at RHS today, and the band progressed to the regionals. Tomorrow they have another performance as well.  C played his chanter. I made it through the waltz with little hesitations. Nancy offered me a piano for $400, but I don’t want to get one until we move.  Have to tell her too.  Sigh.

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decisions

What a blessed emotional relief to have decided, though not yet announced to everyone, that we’ll keep the family intact and move as a single unit. Only until I faced the realities of being apart from some of them did I appreciate how untenable it would have been anyway.  Within a month I’d have just driven east anyway.