More Than A Chapter

When we ended our year-long road trip in 2007, we spend a lot of time exploring the town of Durango, Colorado. We knew at the beginning of our journey that we didn’t want to resettle in the Phoenix-Metro area. Back on the east coast, we had considered New Hampshire as a viable place to set down roots. However, as we moved clockwise around the U.S. and headed back to the west, the country opened up, the mountains became bigger, and we knew this was where we wanted to be.  We did a number of things in Durango, including the contemplation of a land purchase on which to build a house. In the end, we decided to buy a resale property. It wasn’t my first choice, but I soon fell in love with it.  Starting over in a new place includes finding jobs and often locating schools for the kids. In our case, the boys were 3 and 7 months, respectively, so schooling wasn’t a huge concern. But Zane definitely needed additional supports. While we were still traveling, I did a lot of research abo...

  In the three years since Zane died, I’ve noticed something: It’s become hard to connect with new people (and reconnect with others). It’s a revelation I’ve known for a while now, but I only recently started to process it.  When Zane died, my whole life was turned upside down. Prior to his death, I worked at his middle school as an instructional assistant. I loved being in education. I cared deeply about the kids I was assigned to help and adored my colleagues. We were definitely more than just co-workers. I was also Zane’s full-time caregiver, which I loved. It allowed us to become close in a way that we weren’t with any other human being on this planet. After he died (which, by the way, was right before the start of the pandemic), it took me a great deal of time to want to do anything. This was made all the more hard by my cancer diagnosis six months after he passed away. When I finally formulated a new plan for my life, I was still surrounded by people who knew him. I cou...

I have a lot of regrets, as I’m sure most people do. Some of them relate to work and career decisions. Others have to do with being braver and less of a people-pleaser. But my greatest regrets are about my kids: not spending enough time with them, or forcing Zane to do PT almost every day rather than have fun like the majority of kids do. When I share these feelings with other people who knew Zane and my relationship to him, the feedback almost always circles back to the same thing: that we, as a family, did a lot of cool things with Zane.  Of course, that started with the road trip.  Looking back, it was kind of a big deal that we went back on the road with a medically-fragile baby of two months who was under hospice care. Some people might call that irresponsible (there are a lot of haters out there), but we used it to celebrate the things we love with Zane and to create memories for and with him.  Before we pulled our RV out of storage in Ft. Myers, Florida, we planned...

  Grief is a constant companion. Sometimes it looms in billowing clouds, hinting at rain on a sunny day. Other times, it’s like a seed that lies dormant in frozen earth, only waiting for water and sunlight to call it forth. Then there are moments—days even—where grief rises up like a tsunami, completely overpowering all other emotion. There are countless other ways it makes itself known. But the truth is, it’s always there.  After three years, three months, and eight days, I have found ways to allow grief to trail me, rather than to carry it all the time. Because the weight of loss is quite heavy and ever-so tiring. Because I’ve adapted to a new way of life, even if it’s not the life I ever would have planned out for myself. Somehow, some way, I’ve been able to successfully go back to school, get my real estate license, work two jobs, write, read, work out, walk the dog, and find moments of joy in life. And yet—yet—grief stands behind me on occasion and clears its throat. Don’...

  Zane was a surprise baby.  After quitting our jobs, selling our house, and buying a Class C RV, I found out I was pregnant with Zane on day 5 of a year-long road trip to visit all the national parks in the Lower 48. I had missed my period and decided to drive from our campsite in Joshua Tree National Park to the neighboring town of Joshua Tree to buy a pregnancy test. Getting pregnant was the one thing that couldn’t happen while we were on the road. Murphy’s Law, I guess, because it did. We thought about ending our trip, but I decided I wanted to continue. I could make prenatal care work. On the road. And with the help of family members along the way, I mostly did.  I hiked while pregnant and, at first, thought about miscarriage. If there was any time to have one, it was then. We talked about abortion, but that simply wasn’t something I could live with. There are many reasons why, but one of them was the agony I experienced when I lost two previous babies in pregnancy....

  I decided to dust off my old copy of Webster’s New World Dictionary to pull out the meaning of grief. Grief. Grieve. It’s what we do when we’ve lost loved ones. And during that time, memories float to the surface or we intentionally take them out, dust them off, hold them in the palm of our hands or the deep spaces of our hearts, and gaze back upon them like a delicate, glass spheres. Right? I know that’s what I do. Really, every day.  So Webster’s says that this about grief:  Grief (grēf) intense emotional suffering caused by loss, disaster, misfortune, etc.; acute sorrow; deep sadness  Of course, we all know what grief is. Experiencing it is what’s abundantly hard. Society has pre-prescribed notions about what it means to mourn and then ultimately grieve the loss of someone we love. Here are just a few of those ideas:  • After a certain amount of time, you should be over it, move on. Because, of course, time is the healer of all things (insert sarcasm)....

This is going to be short since I just finished working a stressful, 10-hour day in real estate. I dealt throughout the day with two separate agents, and the first one was so unbelievably contentious that my heart rate (which is already problematic due to anxiety and stress from losing Zane and from the BC) soared to scary heights. Thankfully, I don't have to work with the first agent through this deal.  I also wound up with two rejections for my memoir and received news about my abdominal ultrasound, which requires follow-up. Things are not going the way I want (and need) them to, and this only exacerbates my sadness and makes the grief wash over me in torrents. But I managed some self-care by going to the gym and finally taking a shower. Ultimately, I'll decompress by reading. Then I'll start again tomorrow. The thing is: when there are too many down days, they tend to become cumulative. That makes it much harder to elevate myself out of any funk.  That said, how are you ...

Grief over losing children started for me long before I lost Zane. In 2002, I experienced two miscarriages (one in March, the other in September), which were absolutely devastating. I wrote about the first one in an essay called Dead Dobie Wall , which was published by Cliterature Journal in 2011. I thought about tearing snippets from it to paste into this blog post, but it’s interesting, curious, maybe disturbing how much the trauma rushes back up to meet me when I reread the words I wrote back then. I don’t want to revisit that time. Though I probably should.  My grief counselor (when I had one) told me I must do the grief work. I needed to sit with it, take days to mourn, allow myself to cry, and let the pain envelop me. If that meant going to work the next day with puffy eyes, so be it. If it meant losing a whole day of productivity, who cares. Instead of heeding her advice, I would read, write, swim, paint rocks, really do anything else so I didn’t have to face the reality of...

If you’re reading this, you’re likely thinking just that: Where have you been? The last time I posted was on October 24th, 2021. It’s the same time I embarked on a “new life” for myself when became a licensed real estate agent. I had spent a year and a half in a fog after my thirteen-year-old son Zane’s death, and there is so much of that time that I don’t remember.  He died early in 2020. I took a leave of absence from my job as an instructional assistant because I worked in the same school (and often the same classroom) where he attended. Ultimately I decided I couldn’t return to the space he no longer inhabited, so I resigned. Then, a week later, the pandemic struck.  In July of 2020, I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. This would be my third time dealing with it. However, it was more serious this time around. I was shocked. Further devastated. Because the medical profession was overwhelmed at the start of the pandemic (and beyond), I had to wait 6 months before ...