I went through the motions, like they do in all romantic comedies, all the way down to the bottom of the wine glass. In many ways, it was more of a performance than something sincere. Maybe that’s all that “closure” really is—a performance. I have been pondering what “closure” really means for the last four […]
Through the fog of my grief, I discovered that pregnancy loss is like a secret society you never asked to join. You don’t realize how many members there are until you become one of them. There are some questions almost too big to answer. Or too loaded. “How many times have you been pregnant?” is […]
When my father died, I grieved. When my mother died, I fell into a void. I’ve never felt more alone in the world than I have since she died. I want to talk about The Rolling Stones today. I want to talk about books or any damned thing that isn’t today. Fuck today. I didn’t […]
It’s easy to be glib when the more difficult moments are behind you. There is nothing more maddening to me in the throes of something difficult than the advice to “cherish every moment.” The sentiments usually come from someone farther along the path than me—someone buoyed on waves of forgetting and nostalgia for whom the […]
You would never tell an asthmatic that their chest is hurting wrong, just breathe better. The same goes for grief. There were several years in my early 20s that I call my “season of death.” Within a three-year span, one of my best friends, my dad, both of my maternal grandparents, my aunt, and my uncle […]
This was our home. This was where, six years and 22 days after we signed the mortgage papers, he died in my arms. In the weeks and months after my husband died, countless people asked me if we were going to move: out of the house, out of town, out of state, anywhere else. To be […]
Just before my milk let down, I felt a wave of sadness swell from the pit of my stomach. It was a feeling I described to friends as wistfulness, even homesickness, a scooped-out, hollow feeling. A short, but powerful unmooring. Because my pregnancy had been hard, I decided I would only breastfeed my baby if […]
People use to visit cemeteries to mourn their lost loved ones. Now we visit Facebook. When my friend Grant died in 2009 from kidney failure, he didn’t have a Facebook page. He was 26, and otherwise very social, and though Facebook was popular at that time, it was not as unavoidable as it is now. […]
