This is part seven of a series. Here is part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six.

Years ago, long before the popularization of the Instant Pot, Eric and I tried out a different kind of pressure cooker. I was familiar with larger varieties from my mother's years of canning preserves from our garden, but this one was smaller, meant to be used for every day cooking.

We had a big garden of our own by then and had probably attended some kind of preparedness meeting at the church where we learned about the device. Our ward did group buys for products like solar ovens, 72-hour kits, and hand crank wheat grinders (for when the electrical grid failed in the last days prior to Jesus's return, of course).

We tried out the pressure cooker by following one of the provided recipes for chicken and rice. I don't know what went wrong, but that lid sealed itself like it was the last thing standing between us and the center of hell. It was terrifying.

Eric's shitty pandemic-era funeral held in a dingy old funeral home with a 10-person cap on attendees took place on December 4th, 2020.

The next day, we stood awkwardly around a little hole in the ground at the local cemetery while the funeral director struggled to make a production out of my oldest carrying Eric's box of ashes from a delivery van to the graveside. (Cremation isn't all that common in this area).

The day after that, we were finally alone. It was my second oldest's 17th birthday and everything was stupid and impossible.

Family had gone home, delivered meals and care packages were tapering off, and after a long, sleepless night crying, I got up to let Eric's German Shepherd, Molly out.

I've been working through a series for my paid newsletter and thought the free newsletter might like one of its own.

Chapter One: Pudding Brain

If you think you will be the same person after your best friend and lover dies, I am very sorry to tell you that you absolutely will not. I don't think this is talked about enough; in fact, I'm not sure if it's talked about at all.

This is part six of a series. Here is part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five.

Trigger warning: Child SA, not explicit.

I was so certain it wouldn't take a whole month to post part six. So certain. After all, I have this part written out in six different drafts in word counts varying from 2400 to 24,000. How hard could it be? I have settled on the one most like my journal entries. It is long but if I separate it up into different posts, I fear we'll never get there.

Thank you for your patience & continued support. ❤️ Even when you don't hear from me for a while I am writing and editing a lot behind the scenes. Your subscriptions help me feel like I can prioritize writing more than I would otherwise.

This one really should be behind a paywall as it contains some frustration with my culture & church community & I truly don't want to offend, but it's also about showing up, & suicide, & loving people as they are. So I'm going to make it public.

***

I went to a funeral Friday. It was for a twenty-six year old young man who died after a long, difficult battle with depression and anxiety. He didn't "commit" suicide, y'all. He died because the flames in the building were unbearable:

The so-called “psychotically depressed” person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote “hopelessness” or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling “Don’t!” and “Hang on!”, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

-David Foster Wallace

This is part of a maybe never ending series. Here is part one, part two, part three, and part four.

My parents returned home after the ordination, and my kids and I returned to the monumental work of breathing in and out and putting one foot in front of the other.

About a month later (not yet three months since Eric died), things came to a head.

I was still struggling with my dad and his eclipsing experience at Ben's ordination. Despite being able to talk to my brother about it, I felt muzzled. Not wanting to hurt my extended family, I was keeping so much about my faith crisis inside and it was making me sick. It wasn't sustainable; I was going to explode.

I never know how to talk about my wedding anniversary. Eric isn't here so it's not our twenty-third wedding anniversary. But it's still twenty-three years since I married him; something I'd do all over again if I had the DeLoran handy.

It was yesterday anyway, so I don't know why I'm all hung up on semantics.

The day we got married, September 1st, 2000, was a Friday. Our anniversary only fell on a Friday two more times while Eric was alive: 2006 and 2017. Yesterday was the third time. It would have made it easier to get away for the weekend, what with school starting and all. Kind of a weird version of grief math, but it made my day extra melancholy.

I was working in the office when I heard the older boys get home from mowing lawns. My oldest, Jake, sat in the front room reading for a while before he hollered, "Mom, why do I hear water in the vents?"

This is part of a maybe never ending series. Here is part one, part two, and part three.

We last left our heroine reeling from her father claiming that he was possessed by her dead husband.

I did what I always did after my dad's experience during Ben's Aaronic priesthood ordination. I had a private mini-meltdown in my bedroom, then did my best to put on my best people-pleasing face and sit down to listen.

It was a lot.

I was so excited for school to end last year. Summer felt like freedom. We could all sleep in; no more car pool lane, no more moldy lunch boxes, no more "I have a giant project due tomorrow" at 10pm bombs.

And we've had a good summer. My older boys wanted to go camping with us for the first time in several years, and together (what a car load with all five of us!) we explored Central Idaho's Dark Sky Reserve, camping several times along highway 75 and cooling off by jet-skiing & paddle boarding in various mountain lakes.

I'm writing this from our traditional last hurrah before school starts again at Lava Hot Springs; specifically in the one corner of the condo where the (slow) wifi works.

This has turned into a bit of a series. Here is part one and part two. And despite my best efforts, there will likely be a part four.

In April, 2019, Eric's parents were getting ready to leave on their first senior mission. The extended family gathered together to attend their farewell (church meeting where the departing missionary/missionaries speak at the pulpit) and a post-church barbecue. It was the first time I was attending a family party without donning my temple garments just for show. I was scared to death. (I don't think anyone noticed, even though the sleeves of my botanical palm leaf dress were sheer).

Informational sidebar: All Mormon missionaries, whether young men, young women, or senior couples pay their own way. Young people pay $400/month for 18-24+ months if they serve their missions in areas where costs have been standardized (within 18 countries) and more $$$ in areas where costs have not been standardized. Senior couples pay anywhere from $800-$4000 a month with the average being around $1500/month.

These costs are meant to cover food & rent, & other mission related expenses. These amounts do not cover the additional monies needed to buy a new mission-approved wardrobe, luggage, passport/Visa, vaccinations needed for travel, or airline tickets. (Additional fun side-bar, many mission presidents confiscate passports upon the missionary's arrival to prevent loss/theft, but also to prevent missionaries leaving.) Missionaries also pay extra for personal items like souvenirs, stamps, tampons, aspirin, & insurance. Most young missionaries you see walking or biking in your area do not have enough money and are hungry. Many rely on members of the church to feed them, even in poor areas where members are already under financial duress to donate 10% of their monthly income to the church. It's a super great system, is what I'm saying, and I just adore showing up to 'celebrate' someone leaving for a mission.

Eric’s obituary is one of many things I wish I could do over. I barely remember writing it. Eric died on a Thursday night and I think I had to bring a copy of his obituary to a meeting with the mortuary Monday morning—I don’t remember exactly; that entire season of my life is a sick-making smear of angry colors across a black canvas.

• Kristina Mahr (aff link, her book of poems is excellent)

I typed it up in Word, printed it out, and then, at the funeral home, had to read it out loud in front of Eric’s parents. I’m surprised they didn’t request a complete rewrite, to be honest. I can close my eyes and see us, perched on those uncomfortable sofas, bags under our eyes, shock still slapped fresh across our faces. Unreal. Impossible. All of it.

Summer is out and my ADHD brain is struggling to make sense of the shift in schedule. More kids are home and are coming into my office and sitting in my reading chair. They sit there quietly and, well, read, but for whatever reason, it puts me on high-alert. I don't work as well when there is an offspring reading behind me. I don't know why.

I don't want to close the door and hang a 'do not disturb, fragile neurodivergent brain at work' because I like that I am accessible and available and in theory, like that they can come in and keep me company. I do not want to be (more of) a hermited weirdo they must tiptoe around and feel frightened of.

And yet!

I put my noise cancelling earbuds in OR put my noise cancelling headphones on (neither of which I am happy with, I will pontificate on this below) and that seems to help, but then I am constantly saying, "What? I can't hear you" over my shoulder when all they are doing is laughing at a funny passage. The noise-cancellation does not seem to completely assuage the feeling that I am being both watched and intruded upon.

I published my letter and felt the 15,000 pound elephant on my chest shift just enough to let a little light in. I reached out to a few trusted friends who were either 'never-mos' (never Mormons) or ex-Mos* (ex-Mormons) and sent them the link.

* The term "ex-Mormon" can refer to former members who officially remove their names from church records, who are excommunicated by the church, or who just quietly (or not so quietly) fade into inactivity.

In our local friends' group, Kat was the only one who had left the church (about seven years earlier). I used Facebook---a platform I do not frequently use---to DM her the link to the post. I hoped it would be less obvious should she receive notification of a message if she happened to be with our other friends.

She did happen to be with one of our other friends when the notice came through. She was driving our then-friend Tracy somewhere and, not realizing I was sharing something private, handed her the phone so she could check my message and see if it was important.

Editor’s note: This won’t make a whole lot of sense if you weren’t reading and/or writing a blog in the early aughts. If you didn’t read her or know her, here is Heather’s wikipedia page for some background information.

The too-long title for this post is really a Willa Cather quote from One of Ours:

Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw.

My position or lack thereof in the Mommyblogging Hierarchy of Fame

My faith crisis began in February of 2018 after I'd arranged a business meeting that went badly wrong. By November of that same year, I felt like I was going to explode.

My late husband Eric was incredibly loving and supportive, but I felt increasingly isolated and alone. I don't know if I can explain it to someone who has never left a high demand religion or who has never stepped away from an intense family culture; there's a heavy weight---a responsibility you can't quite shake, to not disappoint. To not harm. To not make anyone cry.

I also remembered, with the kind of sharp-focus, unignorable clarity a paradigm shift of this nature brings, how it hurt me when others left. I still remember how sad I was when Casey announced on her blog she was stepping back from Mormonism; when my best friend Kat sent an email to her closest friends attempting to explain why she would no longer be wearing our sacred undergarments. The unique way I grew up meant that I wasn't worried about their immortal souls; I wasn't worried they wouldn't 'make it' into the highest level of Mormon heaven (my dad's worldview had some lovely parts to it), but I was sad.

I didn't feel like I could write about any of it. In whatever iteration of my blog existed in 2018, I wrote some kind of dumb update about stuff that didn't really matter, and at the very bottom, I added a single line about my faith crisis. I wrote it as gently as I could, as innocuously as I could. I framed it like it was something that might still be solvable; I wanted to give hope to those I was about to disappoint, but I needed... desperately needed... to send up some kind of SOS; some kind of message that said, "Hey, if you have also left, will you please reach out? I am drowning."

Last Saturday I decided to attempt yard work. I am not and have never been good at yard work. Eric and I purposefully planned the landscaping at the house to be as low-maintenance as possible, but even with low-maintenance landscaping, sometimes you just have to get out there and pull weeds.

My mother gave me both my thick hair and clear skin, but she also gave me her utter lack of melanin. My dad and sister can work all day in the yard and turn into two brown hazelnuts. Mom and I walk out to get the mail and come back looking like red-and-white striped candy canes.

I have long dreamed of tanning booths where, instead of paying to get sprayed a splotchy orange, one can get into a booth and come out thoroughly coated with 10,000 SPF. Front and back!

I've been trying to write this newsletter for a few weeks. I kept getting derailed by trying to write up a bite-sized introduction to Mormon priesthood first, so I could explain what order & office of the priesthood my father held (holds) before I launched into an explanation about father's blessings.

The priesthood mini-lesson turned into its own post. I didn't send it to subscribers, but it's accessible in my archives here: Mormon Priesthood Mini Lesson. Take "mini" with a grain of salt, but I really did condense a LOT.

It contains a run down on the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood orders and their offices. Mormon men can receive the first level & office of the priesthood at age 11, the year they are turning 12.

It also contains an explanation about the different kinds of priesthood blessings members (and non-members) can receive from Melchizedek priesthood holders.

Sometimes I need to refer to the priesthood in a premium newsletter and it’s a difficult thing to nutshell. So I’m writing up a mini lesson I can point y’all to it whenever it is relevant.

Note: I made an attempt to write this from a place of observational neutrality, but I failed in some places. I fully admit and cop to my post-Mormon bias wherever it surfaces.

Wikipedia explains Mormon priesthood pretty well:

In my never ending search to re-build my dead husband out of apps, I finally signed up for Motion. If you aren’t getting absolutely bombarded by their ads on social media, congratulations, you must be on a different algorithm train.

It always bothers me a little when an ad simply succeeds in pelting me enough times that I admit defeat and take action, but in my defense, the kicker really was a writer friend (who also has ADHD) talking about how great the app was and how well it was working for her.

There aren’t very many AI powered schedulers of the type that can automatically plan your day and automatically shift your tasks around when you forget you had a dentist appointment. Motion is one, Skedpal, Reclaim, Focuster, and FlowSavvy are the others I looked at.

When choosing apps, I look at pricing, features, and then usually make a fairly rash decision based on how the app feels. I am basically a nightmare customer.

Anyone following the Chad Daybell / Lori Vallow case? Lori is currently on trial in Idaho for murder, conspiracy, and grand theft. Chad's lawyer successfully petitioned to have his trial separated from Lori's, though they are charged with many of the same things. His court date has not yet been set.

Here's a timeline if you're not familiar. There's also a documentary on Netflix, though it is missing some key information.

Eric and I were fascinated (in that awful, rubbernecking/trainwreck way) when details of the case began breaking locally late 2019/early 2020. Chad Daybell lived less than 20 minutes north of us and was fairly well-known in Mormon "preparedness" circles. Our neighbor and former ward member (local Mormon congregation) Chris Parrett ran the LDS AVOW (AVOW = Another Voice of Warning) website that sold Chad's books and also hosted a membership forum wherein Chad was an active poster, often sharing his dreams, prophecies, and revelations about the End Times.

4/24/23 edited to add: I had trouble editing this after publishing. I apologize for the typos/grammatical errors. Hopefully most of them are fixed now.

Hi friends,

This week I am writing about my ongoing love/hate relationship with my body.

I absolutely should have added a trigger warning to the free newsletter but forgot because I get awfully caught up in cutting out tens of thousands of extraneous and unimportant backstory.

4/24/23 edited to add: I had some trouble editing this email after publishing. I apologize for the typos/grammatical errors, and for not having a trigger warning at the top. Trigger warnings include: body dysmorphia, eating disorders, self loathing.

Yesterday I woke up and didn’t hate my body. It’s a thing that happens sometimes; a thing I seemingly have very little control over. But it’s nice when it happens.

My body and I have been on quite a ride together. I was one of those annoying people who never worried about weight or whether or not my hips had the right dips. I ate what I wanted and took my clear skin and thick shiny hair for granted. Baby weight fell right off while breastfeeding my first three and I had a husband who celebrated my body regardless of what numbers were on the scale or which Sterilite bin of clothes I was fitting into.

I did not work on any of my book projects while at the much-stressed-about retreat. Instead, I worked on Geography Kid stuff. Please insert audible and overly-dramatic sigh, here. Geography Kid continues to look very much the same from the outside, regardless of how many hours I put into it.

I mean, there is a bit of visible progress. Discover Africa has its new title font and is actually purchase-able, though the Teacher's Guide is still getting formatted, so I haven't made an announcement or done any marketing.

The biggest headache has been with the plan to offer consumable workbooks on the Amazon and in bookstores. The physical copies have been painstakingly designed with perforated pages in mind. This meant instead of organizing the pages so that a country's worksheet + their blank map was visible in an open-book spread like so...

Even though I'd spent my life believing my dad's financial difficulties existed because god was testing him, I also believed that eventually, he would be blessed with a well-earned escape from poverty.

My dad had been working on an intriguing invention/development since the early 90s. Eric had interned with him for one summer, and we believed it had promise. In February of 2018, I arranged a business meeting with a potential investor and invited my dad up to Idaho. Dad showed up and walked through my house closing blinds, lifting a blade with one finger to nod at our neighbor's truck.

"That's an agent," he said in a low voice, his lips barely moving. "They followed us up here from Utah."

"Dad," I said gently, tugging him away from the window. "That's Brother Martin. He's a chef at the casino on the reservation. He always gets home at this time."

Dr. Feinauer was my pediatrician when I was a little girl. I remember visiting the Salt Lake Clinic with my mother and pressing my nose against the aquarium in his waiting room, hoping to catch a glimpse of the black spotted pleco that liked to suck up rocks on the bottom and spit them back out.

This Norman Rockwell print hung in the exam room and I worried a lot about whether the doctor in the picture was going to warn the boy before sticking him. Dr. Feinauer always warned me and I thought that was only fair.

I don’t remember if I cried getting shots or if I was indeed “very brave” like the doctor always said; either way I got a lollipop at the end and some kind of sticker, but the best part was the colorful bandaid. After receiving my Kindergarten shots, I ran to my friend Jill’s house (just across the cul-de-sac) and promptly dropped my Holly Hobbie drawers to show her the Snoopy bandaid on my butt. She had one too; I think it was Woodstock.

I come to you from a state of active panic. What else is new, you ask? But wait! This is, at least a new flavor of panic.

Okay, that’s kind of lie. It’s just a bunch of old flavors of panic blended together. The whole sad mess is a pungent anxiety sauce simmering away on all four burners of my brain.

Nick from New Girl being charmingly disgusting.

It was 1987 and my friend Jodi and I had walked to my house after school. We were in sixth grade and loved the Sweet Valley High books with our whole entire beings. Who even knows which of the almost 200 books we had just finished, but we were talking about it excitedly as we left my bedroom, which was located right across the hall from my dad's office.

I adjusted my (homemade) UNITS knit separates as I pulled my door closed, chattering about the book. My hand still on the doorknob, I quoted one of the last lines in the book; a line where one of the characters exclaims, "Oh my god."

We both froze. Jodi stared at me as all the color drained from my face. I clamped both hands over my mouth and whispered through my shaking fingers, "Don't... don't tell anyone I said that."

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.