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I know the world is on fire right now. I can’t even begin to express the compounded grief from yet another mass shooting and the way our country is attacking trans people and drag queens and banning books rather than dealing with our gun crisis. This entire entry is a frustrating exercise in navel gazing rage. It’s dumb and meaningless which makes me feel even worse about it, but if I can’t scream into the void I might combust.

I was going to write about the second half of our spring break trip, driving and hiking through gorgeous and unfathomable redwood trees, and the insanely long drive home through a desolate place in Oregon called Christmas Valley wherein I toppled from my precarious crouch over a horrific pee-covered toilet and ended up coated in a lot of urine, but I’m going to shout a lot about Walmart and Chase instead.

One pretty picture from our trip since the rest of this post contains ugly screenshots and sadness.

I didn’t think we could do anything for spring break this year. I needed to save money. I needed to work. I needed to sit in my office and panic about everything.

But I got a little bit of good-ish news and the tight spaces in my chest relaxed a fraction. I looked at Katie’s expense sheet from the last time we drove to the coast and thought… I think we can do this again.

I’m not normally one that likes spontaneity. I like having itineraries and maps and planned gas & potty stops—at least for the travel bits. I definitely do not want my vacation to be stuffed to the gills with touristy things to go and do (please lots of naps in fluffy comforters and books read by a fire), but I’m going to flip you all the middle fingers if you roll up and expect me to jump in the car without at least a week’s notice.

Welcome to the land behind the paywall! I'm delighted (and a little gobsmacked) that you're here. Thank you.

My parents were babies when they got married in 1975. My mom just 19; my dad fresh off his two-year proselytizing mission for the Mormon church at 21. They had me, a bicentennial baby with a red, white, and blue birth certificate, a year later.

The church was more outspoken against birth control in those days, issuing this statement) in 1969:

We seriously regret that there should exist a sentiment or feeling among any members of the Church to curtail the birth of their children. We have been commanded to multiply and replenish the earth that we may have joy and rejoicing in our posterity. Where husband and wife enjoy health and vigor and are free from impurities that would be entailed upon their posterity, it is contrary to the teachings of the Church artificially to curtail or prevent the birth of children. We believe that those who practice birth control will reap disappointment by and by.

TL;DR: This got long (surprise, surprise). If you’d like to skip past the memory lane bit, skip down to the “Midas Touch” header.

An incomplete history of my entrepreneurial past

I built my first business when I was still pregnant with my now 21-year old.

It wasn’t a success.

Building a husband out of apps.

I never should promise to continue a story at the bottom of one newsletter unless said story is already written. As much as I enjoy a completed narrative arc, I have trouble with follow-through.

The idea is, of course, to create some accountability, something my ADHD brain needs. By saying I’ll be back next week, it books an appointment (albeit loosely) on the calendar. By telling you what I’ll be writing about, it gives me a starting point so I’m not aimlessly chucking stories in my head at the screen. All good things. In theory, anyway.

I really should know better. Appointments, commitment, regularity, and a narrowed topic often leave me feeling like I’ve painted myself into a corner. I huddle in that corner typing garbage drafts and worrying I’ll jinx myself if I write about whatever I’m working on before it’s ready. Or worse, I don’t write anything at all and abandon ship thinking, ‘Well, I’m off the rails already, why bother?’.

My earliest memories are from before I was two years old. I remember my dress getting nibbled on by a goat at the zoo and how my mom’s hair got warm in the sun. I remember lying in a crib in a room with green shag carpet and having a nightmare about bees.

I vividly remember riding in the front seat of my mom’s red Volkswagen Squareback station wagon. We’d drive over to the lot where my dad was building our new house, probably to bring him lunch. My little sister wasn’t born yet, so I wasn’t yet three. He’d carry me through the framework (I called it the house’s skeleton) and explain how we could step through walls because the sheetrock wasn’t up yet. He held me as we stood near the hole in the floor where our chimney would be. It felt dangerous looking through it and seeing the garage floor below, but I knew I was safe in my dad’s arms.

Preschool, elementary school, junior high, high school, and college… there’s very little I don’t remember (a family trip to Yellowstone when I was in the ninth grade has oddly vanished from memory; my mom is stunned), while Eric would squint his eyes and consider his earliest memory, unable to remember much beyond adolescence.

Once I settled on Buttondown as my Substack-alternative newsletter, I figured it would be many months (if not years) before I hit the first threshold of 100 subscribers. Hahahahaha, y’all surpassed it the first day I announced the move.

Wow. So… welcome! I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, but maybe we can figure it out together.

A few days ago, I completed the final blog-to-book printing of my Very Mom posts (terrible awful grief edition) before archiving everything and turning the domain into a landing page with a silly little 404 error page for the people who still follow old Pinterest links.

Today I found myself typing up an answer to a “Help I have hives” bat signal and realized I could compile everything I’ve learned for anyone else slogging through the utter hellscape that is chronic urticaria. (You don’t have to read it, it’s long and there is gratuitous, but welt-covered nudity).

Welcome to the future where we newsletter instead of blog. Come with me, let’s marinate in the past for a moment.

I started blogging in 2001 on one of those free blogspot sites. It was before they had banner ads and comments hadn’t been invented yet. At some point, I purchased the Very Mom domain and installed Greymatter.

I record my private journal on an app called Day One (Mac only, I think). I started using it before Eric died, and sometimes I torture myself by going back and reading through the banal entries I wrote before my world imploded.

The normalcy, security, and stability in those entries is just so cute. It’s like re-watching a movie that ends in disaster. She doesn’t know yet, the woman who wrote about yoga class and cleaning out the garage, that she’s days away from unfathomable, devastating loss.

When I first started writing again here, my therapist was surprised I’d share so much in a public space. She was a relatively new therapist and didn’t know I’d spent almost two decades writing about my life on the internet (at that point, anyway—we are now past my 20th blogging anniversary, huzzah & confetti & etc). But what I wrote here is nothing compared to what I wrote in that little app.

And the other night I thought I might be ready to read some of it again.

Dear Eric,

Parts of this pain feel as though you left me only yesterday. The memories of that fateful night are burned onto my retinas and seared across my brain like a still-sizzling cattle brand. This is the part that reaches for you in the night, fully expecting to find your waiting arms. Half-asleep-me can’t figure out why you’re out of bed at two o’clock in the morning. Once I rouse enough to remember, confusion turns into chest-wracking sobs.

Other parts of this pain feel as though I have carried it for eons. Since the dawn of time, it seems, I have trekked across this desert wasteland sucking lungfuls of scorching air, sand stinging my eyes and filling my mouth with grit. I am bent and broken under this heavy load, but I cannot put it down; it is a part of me, fused with my back and arms and neck. This burdened soul feels ancient in her loneliness, her Sisyphean task unending and pointless. Here, time has lost all meaning; it is upside down and backwards. There is no restful night here, no cool moon or sea of endless stars. Only an unrelenting sun barely discernible in a scorched, white-hot sky.

Last year, Eric and I found a SwimEx 600S lap pool for sale on eBay. SwimEx is kind of like an Endless Pool, (only better IMO). Using paddle wheels, it creates a smooth current that you can swim against. I love, love, love lap swimming, but our town does not have a community pool. Every so often, we’d get a membership to a gym in the neighboring city but the commute would wear on us and we’d stop going. Getting a pool of our own would be a dream come true, and here was a used one for a fraction of the price.

I can’t actually believe we did it. It was an incredible ordeal. We had to rent a 20’ long flatbed trailer, drive it to California, rent a tele handler to raise the enormous 6’ tall, almost 8’ wide, 20’ long pool onto the trailer, pad it with cardboard and carpet strips, strap it down, drive it all the way home, and use a forklift to maneuver it into position in the shop.

We said repeatedly that it was one of the most absurd things we’d ever done. We didn’t even want to tell our friends or family because it was just so ridiculous. The thing looked like a submarine once we got it into our shop. We had to remind each other that it didn’t matter what it looked like as long as it functioned.

Dear Eric,

I missed you this morning.

The kids and I braved a sort of make-shift holiday for spring break and rented an airbnb down in SLC. When I suggested the trip, I was certain no one would want to go. Everything feels so strange without you, no one has really had the heart. But I think they were all ready to get out of the house, even if we would just move from one place to another and do the exact same things (play video games, sleep a lot, and eat too much pizza).

We had to check out of the airbnb at 11:00 am, which you know is not the easiest for your not-a-morning person wife or your not-morning-people children. My alarm went off at 9:30 and I did not go back to sleep. Instead, I pulled off my sleep mask and thought about all the things you would be doing if you were with us.

The first time I went into a hardware store after Eric died, I wasn’t thinking about him. Jake and I were just out and about, running errands, checking stuff off our lists.

Jake waited for me in the car, and I remember walking through the automatic doors, adjusting my face mask… and two steps past the shopping cart vestibule, it hit me.

I’ve been to hardware stores lots of times by myself… but there were way more trips with Eric. We’d make quick stops to pick up a box of screws or a can of paint, or we’d wander around looking at kitchen displays and appliances for date night. I’ve spent hours in the lumber aisle helping Eric choose the straightest boards while he double-checked his plans sketched on a scrap of graph paper.

Out in the country where I live, we don’t have mail trucks.

For years, a lady would lean awkwardly across the passenger side of a maroon sedan to deliver mail. The postal workers drove random, unmarked cars and the only way you could recognize one was because they were pulled up to the mailboxes and their back seats were stuffed with packages.

A while ago, they must have sprung for some special-order European cars with the steering wheel on the right. They still aren’t mail trucks, but now the postal workers can at least deliver packages without throwing out their backs.

None of this is particularly important to the story. It just occurred to me that it’s mildly interesting if you live in a bigger suburb or city where mail delivery is normal.

I went back to my small (good at social distancing) yoga studio for the first time Monday night.

They do hot yoga and the lights are kept very low. Music plays pretty loudly and it creates a kind of sound bath, I guess. It’s a good place to face some emotions and you can cry without anyone noticing.

After I wrote that grief is more like a giant scribble (I’m so tired of hearing about the “stages” of grief, like it’s a tidy path with a finish line at the end), I went looking for graphics and found this:

I am too old to remake myself.

Rebirth is only for the young. For those with fresh faces and smooth skin. For those who can pack up an old car with everything they own and start over in a brand new place.

I feel, though perhaps it isn’t true, that if this ugly fate came to me earlier, I’d’ve remade myself with the energy and vitality I still possessed as a twenty-something or even a young thirty-something.

I got Eric’s ring back from the jeweler. I did not know what to expect or how I would feel about it.

Reader, I sobbed.

I couldn’t get to my car fast enough.

For anyone who has been reading or following me for a long time, you’ll know that my husband did not like his picture taken. Or, perhaps more to the point, he didn’t like his picture shared on the internet. The profile picture on his email account is a picture of the top of his head.

It was funny at the time and it’s still funny, though there’s a part of me that’s a little petulant he deprived me of a photo of his face. It’s very him though, so the other part of me is glad to have this record (among many others) of his personality.

I had to go through his things earlier than I would have liked. I needed passwords and logins for work-related things, and found myself scrolling through his short list of pictures, videos, and audio recordings.

When a friend and neighbor died in May, I checked her Facebook page daily—sometimes hourly. I read all the condolences with tears running down my face, looking back through all the photos and posts she’d made documenting her life as a wife and mother. When her husband posted updates, photos, and thank-you notes, I cried harder. It felt important to pay attention; to not immediately return to my normal life. I was, in some strange modern way, holding vigil for the family; attempting to carry a small portion of their terrible tragedy in whatever way I could.

I know others have wanted to do the same for me, but I haven’t been able to face social media since Eric died. I’ve opened my accounts to read condolence messages and share them with my kids. We’ve felt the love and the shared sorrow from family, friends, and people I only know through the computer screen. I’ve been grateful for a way to get the word out while also remaining grateful for the barrier my friend Kat helped create by posting updates and information for me. It formed a mental barricade between the reality of engaging with people and my own personal mourning.

I thought eventually I’d be able to post on those accounts myself, but so far I haven’t been able to. Instagram and Facebook are pretty painful places to be, especially during a holiday season. So many of you are living your beautiful lives with your very much alive spouses and partners, and while I’m happy for you (so, so happy for you), I also can’t take it.

But this space—this weird, historied, complicated blog space—is all mine. No one else’s stories are here. No one else’s photos. I don’t even have to look through pages of happier times because I archived years of blog posts and printed it all into books back in January. That feels extremely apropos now; I just need a clean slate. I do enough wallowing in our family albums as it is.

I took Molly on a walk around the lake. The water is drained in the wintertime, so this spot where I swam with Eric last summer is just an empty bowl of snow.

I can’t scoop up some of the water and hope it maybe touched his body. I can’t see the rocks we picked our way through as we waded into the deep. I can’t tell where the shoreline began or find the place where we spread out our towels.

So I just stood in the snow and cried.