[From February 28, 2018: There’s no way to honestly convey the depths of all we’ve experienced without including the events of a particular weekend in February 2018. Even a number of years later, though, I’m hesitant to pick at its scab, knowing full well that we’ve yet to fully recover from it. As I sit […]
[From January 17, 2018: As I’ve been going back through the various entries I either wrote in my journals and/or posted on social media, I’ve been looking for a handful of representative pieces from each season of our experience. There are some things that now, with the benefit of a little hindsight, I know ended […]
[From October 23, 2017: I am forever thankful for good friends who have seen behind the curtain… and love us anyway. And spoiler alert, yes, we went to that concert in Chicago!] We had a great weekend planned. Our dear friends were coming to visit with their beloved black lab, Maggie, in tow. It was […]
[From August 6, 2017: Yes, at the exact moment when our world was fully upended, we decided to buy a house and move. How hard could that be, right? The move was also an acknowledgment that our lives were going to look different than we might have originally planned, so we needed to dramatically recalibrate. […]
[From April 20, 2017: Oh, how I miss this man.] After Pete & Beth came to visit us last year, I told Beth that my wife had developed a pretty big crush on Pete. “I might even be slightly bothered by it,” I disclosed, “if I didn’t have a pretty serious crush on him, too.” […]
[From December 8, 2016.] She hasn’t really wanted her picture taken, much less posted for all the world (or really, anyone) to see, since she was first diagnosed. This disease and all of its vast indignities — the surgeries, the infections, the disintegrating jawbone, the dramatic weight loss, the isolation — haven’t just decimated her […]
[From February 7, 2016: Because sometimes the little things… aren’t.] I know it wasn’t really about toothpaste. Standing there in the middle of Target late on a Sunday evening a couple weeks ago, though, it felt like a personal assault, like the final insult in a string of ridiculous injustices being thrust upon us. And […]
[From January 19, 2016: Here’s another from some of the earliest days of The Shitshow, when every day felt like a new indignity, a new diagnosis, and a new reality.] When a tornado rips through a small town in the Midwest, leveling a trailer park or maybe an elementary school, invariably there will be someone […]
[From February 20, 2016: This entry was written on a quick 36-hour “mental health getaway” to Los Angeles, something I used to do a lot in the days before the shit storm. It’s weird to think that I haven’t been back to LA since.] Sometimes I worry that I’ve given you the wrong impression. I […]
[From April 6, 2016: If you want to guarantee the ire of a caregiver, lecture them about the importance of “self-care.” That said, most caregivers could probably use the occasional lecture about self-care. I wrote the following at the beginning of my own dalliance with the very notion of self-care. It’s worth noting that several […]
Sometimes I ramble. 