Adventure Mom

Ten Years On Our ten-year wedding anniversary, Dec 3, 2009 Scattering ashes in Michigan, August, 2010 January 23, 2010 is a date I'm afraid to remember and scared I'll forget. It's the day Sean died. I wanted to write about the weirdness of marking ten years since Sean’s death, but it’s almost too big a task. It’s like straining to hear what my kids are asking from the other room while the kettle is boiling in front of me; like trying to figure out how to build a bookshelf when the instructions are cryptic pictograms.  How to talk about a decade of living, loving, grieving? It’s like a trip to the moon and back ten times and also like a walk to the corner store. It has been a long odyssey and a quick jaunt. What no one can tell you about the years stretching between death and this-new-normal-kinda-life is how your perspective will change. What once seemed important now seems trivial, and the person you were back then is different from...

Anniversaries Don’t Die Dec. 3, 2019: Sean and I would’ve celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary today, December third, in the States (yesterday in New Zealand). We only made it to ten years because he died. I like to think we’d still be together, but it’s easy to make these assumptions with a late spouse. In death, we are who our loved ones imagine us to be - steadfast, funny, smart, kind… In a domestic relationship between the living and the dead, there is no arguing about who’ll clean toilets, take out trash or taxi kids. There is only perfection refracted by the aging angles of memory. We married on a misty Friday evening in the glow of candlelight at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. He, at 38 years old, still looked youthful in his tuxedo and boutonniere; I, at 29, carried an enormous bouquet of crimson roses and wore a dress with beaded bodice and train. Full of hope and promise, we had no idea what would come later - a premature baby whose kidney ...