Our Last Good Day

Our last good day was a Saturday.

Our last normal day was a Friday.

I drove our daughter to preschool and Ted rode his bike to work downtown. I had a freelance proofreading assignment to finish so I made a second cup of coffee. I wanted to get the work off my plate because we were leaving for a week-long trip to Hawaii on Sunday. My to-do list for our family…

I miss our old life. I’m trying to work through feeling sorry for myself, but here it is, still with me — the pity and the sorrow and the anger. There are so many platitudes that fit what my family is experiencing. These sayings are all true but they make me sad because there isn’t a damn thing I can do about any of this.

Fit For A Widow

In my early months of widowhood I bought new clothes.

Last night a butterfly was trapped in our laundry room.

Mabel was asleep after reading “Maybelle The Cable Car,” a book about gentrification in 1940s San Francisco. Ted was at the hospital with a feeding tube. His mother was likely sitting next to him in the terrible vinyl visitor’s chair. I was having a quiet evening at…

I can’t get annoyed with Ted the way I used to get annoyed with Ted. Like the way he would use the bamboo cutting board as a sandwich plate, and the jelly and peanut butter would be stuck to it and I would have to hand-wash it hours later so I could prepare dinner. It was our version of the husband who always leaves the toilet seat up and the wife…

Strength Plus Balance = Resilience

I spent 17 months bracing for impact. But there’s really no way to prepare for loss. When I told our six-year-old daughter that her father died, I felt a cosmic shift that left me raw. My husband died and I had to be the one to guide our child through enormous grief. I…

Just call me Claire. Claire Underwood.

A few weeks ago I installed a rowing machine in our garage. I’ve been having trouble making it to fitness classes…