[From December 17, 2017: I know I’m skipping around a bit, chronologically, but this popped up today in Facebook’s “on this day” memories and I thought it was worth repeating. I also thought, holy shit, we’ve been doing this a long time. Then there’s the fact that the pandemic (and, for us, a string of […]
[From July 12, 2021: So much of my writing in the months after losing my grandfather was centered on trying to process that grief. It was complicated, of course, by the isolation and general grief of the pandemic that was ravaging our country, but even though I spent quite a lot of time both thinking […]
[From November 1, 2020: Hero-sized hole.] When I was a kid — maybe 6 or 7, although the exact age escapes me — I was on a fishing trip with my grandfather and uncle on Lake Erie. It was a typical part of my childhood summers, spending time on the lake on various trips to […]
[From October 27-28, 2020: The bulk of 2020 was incredibly difficult for the entire world, as we all found ourselves dealing with a once-in-a-century virus. The pandemic undoubtedly caused a lot of extra stress for Chelli and me, as we tried to fashion an existence that would ultimately protect her from a virus that a […]
[From September 1, 2020: Yes, everyone was fine and yes, cars can be fixed. But this dance between safety and independence, especially with a raging pandemic all around us, has nearly been the death of me more than a few times. This is one of those times.] One of the great difficulties of navigating these […]
[From January 31, 2019: This is something I continue to talk about because we took it so personally in the beginning. I’ve come to learn that it’s not even just a part of living through trials, but maybe just a part of living.] One of the first things I tell people when they ask for […]
[From December 5, 2018: This was written the last time we were in Tulsa, four years and a day ago, before such travel decisions would become all the more complicated by the pandemic. Chelli hadn’t been traveling in a couple years at that point, but her mother’s swift decline into dementia had become severe enough […]
[From November 14, 2018: As I look back through everything I’ve written over this 7+ year period and try to figure out which entries represent each time or season, I see the way I was often looking for examples — something akin to an unspoken mentorship, I guess — of how to do this hard […]
[From May 8, 2018: Psychological stress fractures plagued us for months, in ways great and small, but always unexpected.] I had fallen asleep on the couch around midnight, following a quiet evening of “self-care” at the house, just Chelli and Stella and me, trying to catch our breath after an emotionally grueling day. Our Friday […]
[From April 16, 2018: Lessons from one of the humans I have loved most in this world.] During the last years of my paternal grandmother’s life, her mind ravaged by the cruel joke of Alzheimer’s, my grandfather served as her primary caregiver. He would have it no other way, he always made clear, because he’d […]
Sometimes I ramble. 