Incompatible with Life

Earlier this week, I spent a chunk of a cool summer’s evening sitting in a dark parking lot at the Veterans’ Administration complex, listening to the muted roar of One Direction fans singing along to their favorite tunes. It was the fifth and final event in my daughter’s year-long endeavor to see her favorite artists live and in person. It started with an October road trip to Moline, IL that included an overnight stay in an overly expensive hotel. I stayed in the room, plugging away on revision, while Sammy and her friend sang and danced with Demi Lovato in the arena next door. I slept on the pull-out couch while they commandeered the king-sized sleep number bed, reliving with breathless wonder every moment of the show. The next stop was an arena closer to home on one of the coldest evenings of February. Not wanting to go downtown and back twice, Scott and I dropped the girls off near the Ariana Grande marquee, went out to dinner, visited the auto show, and finally made our wa

I used to love September. The shift from sultry summer to crisp autumn was a welcome one. I enjoyed the back to school vibe. I marveled at the brightly colored leaves drifting from the trees, and savored the sounds of apple orchards and pumpkin farms. Heck, I even got married in September. It was Anna who obliterated my adoration of autumn. She was due in November—11/11 to be exact—although she ultimately arrived on 10/10. I’d learned in June that she carried a fatal chromosome defect, and by the time we reached September, she’d already outlived her life expectancy by two months. That September was a month of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was filled to the gills with excess amniotic fluid and having contractions almost constantly. I knew that the end was near. I lived under a steady drumbeat of impending doom that none of the pleasures of autumn—not even the first pumpkin spice latte and slice of caramel apple pie—could mute. Every September since has resurrected t

You say you know A lifetime ago (And smugly, too) I thought I knew A million dry runs in   Technicolor daydreams Yet unprepared Caught unaware I hurtled from the track In far-flung frenzy Broken, groping Faintly hoping But, oh! The dark I emerged Alive (not fully) Whole (not really) Shattered, scattered Dead and buried in The new normal You issue demands Always needier, ever greedier And stare through the obvious With reckless oblivion Don’t tell me that you know— You don’t. Can’t? Won’t. Incompatible with Life: A story of hope

“Pennies from heaven” is a phenomenon oft-referenced by advice columnists in their discussions of grief. It is not uncommon for the bereaved to find pennies that seem to have been sent from their deceased loved ones. I never gave much thought to the origins of the coins I found at my feet. I’d occasionally come across a penny—find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck!—but I never considered that they could have come from anywhere more remote than someone’s faulty pocket. That changed after Anna’s death. A few weeks after her funeral, I found a dime on the garage floor. I found another one in a parking lot…and then another one in my bedroom. Dimes were popping up all over the place, seemingly out of nowhere. At first, I figured it was random, just a weird coincidence that I was pocketing ten cents on such a regular basis. It took me a while to connect the dots between the specific denomination of the coin and Anna’s birth date, October 10. Might it be som

I never appreciated my hair. Dirt brown in color, it was thick, but fine—straight, but it frizzed in humidity.  I spent most of my adolescence trying to beat it into submission through overly regular home perms and the occasional shearing to remove the resulting damage. Added to my misery was the fact that I was woefully inept at styling. Curling irons, flat irons, hot rollers—none of them worked in my hands. Insertion of a ponytail holder was really the only option I’d mastered. I wavered between short and shoulder length for much of my early adulthood, growing it out only to cut it all off again. I was a regular in the hair coloring aisle and—for a brief period of poor investments just prior to marriage—in the chair of a high-end salon to maintain the burnt sienna shade I’d come to favor. I decided in my thirties that highlights and layers would be the best way to add movement and interest to my limp locks. This bold move resulted ever-lightening brassy streaks that illu

I prayed for patience and my prayer was answered—in the form of a cancer diagnosis. Cancer demands patience. More patience than you knew you had, more than you knew you were even capable of. Every trip to the doctor’s office—and there’s rarely just one practitioner that you see—requires that you wait your turn for an interval ranging from minutes to hours, depending upon how busy the doctor happens to be that day and the level of complication of the case that walks in the door just ahead of you. Cancer offers you endless tests, each of which has its own incubation period for rendering results. You wait with bated breath for each call, wondering if it will clear you or further seal your fate. Chemotherapy ties you down in a most literal way, tethering you to an IV as you wait for an excruciatingly slow drip, drip, drip to be done, done, done; counting up or down, depending upon where you are in your quest to complete the magic number of cycles that your oncologist has p

“Everything happens for a reason.” It’s one of the most common rote responses we have when we hear of someone else’s tragedy. I’ve been on the receiving end of this comment more times than I care to count…and I hate it. Seriously, I’d love to see it eradicated from the English language. When people tell me that there’s a reason I got cancer, it implies that there’s a reason why they didn’t. When they tell me that there’s a reason I lost my baby, the unspoken message is—well, you know. Those words, strung together in an overture of sympathy, provide comfort only to the person speaking them. They represent a very convenient and human reaction to tragedy—seeking meaning in a way that enables us to distance ourselves from the possibility that such a thing could happen to us. Interestingly, I’ve never heard this phrase uttered by a parent who’s buried a child, or a widow who lost her beloved spouse. I’ve never heard someone with a life-threatening medical condition suggest

When you undergo a significant loss, you find that anniversaries--be they actual wedding anniversaries, birthdays of a deceased family member, diagnosis dates, or the date that a loved one passed away—pack an intense wallop that can knock you off your feet (and game) in the days and weeks leading up to them. One might presume that the first of these anniversaries would be the most devastating, but that assumption would be incorrect. The truth is, you don’t know how the day will feel until it arrives. The second, or fifth, or twelfth might hit you just as hard, or perhaps even more so, than the first. Sorrow takes many shapes (most of them ugly) and morphs into its various forms at the most inopportune moments, creating a temperamental typhoon that’s not entirely predictable, and certainly not preventable. In fact, the more rigidly you try to control it, the more likely you are to come unhinged. A vague sense of anxiety, an uptick in sadness, negative thought patterns, an e