On the floor of my kitchen, back against my fridge. This is the place where my grief often meets me. It’s the place I found myself when my house was empty for the first time after my husband’s death. It’s the place where I found myself just about every morning for the weeks that followed. … More The Place Where Grief Meets Me
The day of my shipwreck? I mean, talk about semantics. What do you consider the actual day of the shipwreck? Is it just the day that the leak started, that the ship begins to go under? Or is it the day that the entire ship goes down? The day of complete and total submersion? The … More Shipwrecked
I didn’t want to celebrate this day. I honestly didn’t even want to participate in it. I wanted to distract myself enough to believe that somehow life now simply skips from October 11 to October 13, and then we could all just go another year without acknowledging that we are now living in year two … More We Always Celebrate
The flowers were attracting flies. I wish I could give a great, heartfelt beginning to this story. I wish I had some spiritual nudge, some inclination that someone needed these flowers in that very moment. But where this story starts is… I had a lot of really beautiful flowers in my house, and they were … More The Giver of Free Flowers
“Can you play, Raise a Hallelujah?” I sat up a from the hard pullout couch that I was attempting to make a bed out of, and I looked over at him. I didn’t know if I heard him correctly. I didn’t know if I heard him at all. He laid perfectly still in his bed … More Anger 6: Finishing the Race
There is a drawer on the far-right side of my entryway table that I do not touch. This is ironic because before Andrew died, I resorted to the drawer religiously. Every hour, I rushed to it in hopes of finding something, anything, that might put out whatever fire we were currently staring into. This drawer … More You Win
Words fail me. They never use to. Words were always my friend. They had my back. Even when sometimes they were a bit unrefined, impulsive, sharp- they were there. Over the past few weeks words have been hit or miss with me. Sometimes my mind is loud, the words are clear. But some days they … More Well Done
I flung myself off of the mountain months ago. Maybe I didn’t fling, maybe I was pushed, maybe I tripped. I don’t exactly know how I ended up in a free fall, but I know that about a year ago, I ended up free falling, and not in the cute Tom Petty kind of way. … More Rocky Rocky Rock Bottom
I have lived a million people’s tragedies, and I always seem to live it way better than they do. I mean, we all have, right? We’ve read books and watched movies. We have heard, seen, read people’s stories. We hear stories about the many things that create a life, and unfortunately, much of that is … More Tragic Grace
My 65-year-old neighbor puts my trashcan out on the street for me every Friday morning. It’s the smallest gesture, but it means the absolute world to me. My next-door neighbors are originally from Nigeria. Earlier this year, they learned that my husband had stage four cancer, and the wife of the pair rushed out one … More First World Probs.
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