Happy birthday Justin. I’m missing you so much tonight. Wish I could bake you a cake… In the grocery store tonight I found myself in the bake aisle–I don’t eat sugar or flour anymore, you wouldn’t like that–and it sliced me that I wanted to bake you a birthday cake, and…
It was my long week of anniversaries: an adoption date, a wedding anniversary for a marriage that ended in divorce, and the eighth anniversary of my teenage son’s death by suicide. Annually, when this week cycles, I have learned to lean-in and ride the emotional wave, taking care of my…
My son, Justin, had died three weeks earlier. It was Valentine’s Day, 2006, and I stood in his bedroom, gazing at his bookshelf, in early afternoon light. I selected a book, pulling it from a tight shelf, and another paperback simultaneously slid out, fell, landed on the floor. I put…
The night before my son died, I opened mail, standing in the kitchen. My boy sat at a round table, watching. Soup heated on the stove. I had worked all day, and needed to attend a class later that evening. He had stayed home from high school, sick with the…