Ode to the Ignorant

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

“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

Letting Go

My mother is a firm believer in rummage sales. Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to go on an annual purge of my toy collection, to cull the items that I’d held onto mostly out of the comfort of familiarity and send them off to a new home. I was an anxious child and this task always pushed me to my limits. I was never quite ready to let go and even the promise of jingling coins adding up in my piggy bank was not enough to loosen my grip on the long-forgotten and ignored items in my toy box. As I got older, though, I began to see the wisdom and beauty in it. When you release something that no longer works for you, you free yourself from the burden of unnecessary clutter, and bless someone else with your bounty. The older I got, the more easily I handed off unworn clothing, uncomfortable shoes, and outgrown home décor. This release did not extend to my relationships, however. I held on long past revelations of irreconcilable flaws of character, kept a firm grasp even i

A Private Funeral

On the day that I buried my infant daughter, I received a card from a distant relative on my husband’s side. I’d call it a sympathy card, but the hand-scrawled message from the sender negated any comfort it was meant to bring to us. “It’s so refreshing to hear of a couple choosing life over abortion.” Refreshing? That’s a word that wouldn’t make my top million descriptors of the experience. Was it excruciating, soul-crushing, and bone-wearying? Yes. Refreshing? Not in the least. I’ve tried, over and over again, to understand what would prompt someone to think such a thing, much less write it in a missive to the bereaved, but I can’t find a reasonable explanation, other than the fact that it’s easy to arm-chair quarterback the lives of people you’ve only met once. It’s easy to judge when you don’t have a vested interest in the case at hand. It was precisely that fact that led us to a private funeral for Anna. After months of being asked if I was going to terminate the

Incompatible with Life

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