Category: Musings

Compost: How I Lost My Husband and Regained a Home

There’s a bathroom in there somewhere Roughly six weeks after my husband’s death, my house cleared its throat and got my attention. I was standing at the kitchen sink, trying to get the right-hand cabinet door to stay shut again (it took the lightest touch and usually several tries) when the thought occurred to me… Read more »

11 is now 12

I ask you, is there any creature more gleeful than a child ripping open a birthday package that he suspects contains cold, hard cash and candy? I’ve never seen it if there is. I love watching him. It is magnificent, an unguarded display of absolute glee in abundance that makes me incredibly happy. Also as his parent, horrified…. Read more »

Valentine’s Day Was Always Mine

I wrote this piece in 2016, six months after my husband died. I’m reprising it today (with edits) to launch my writing on Stubstack. There is so much information coming at us these days, so much of it highlighting the terror which is our patterned response to everything unprecedented and uncertain. Which the future always… Read more »

Did The Buddha Ever Have To Watch His Language?

So much for my resolution to stop lobbing f-bombs. This piece is for Phyllis Ring, whose superpower is kindness. She’s crazy good at it. There is a point in my husband’s memorial service I think about often. I’ve just arrived at the podium to give his eulogy. My feet — I can’t figure out where to… Read more »

Happy Hanukkah From My Dead Husband, The Latke King

Gifts from beyond the Amtrak Quiet Car. Brothers and Sisters, Let us take a moment to grieve this first Hanukkah without the offerings of The Latke King. Never was there a Goy so skilled in the frying of these, the most important potatoes of the year. He raised the Latke to such an art form,… Read more »

Joy Is Not Earned

Grief has a thousand faces. Right now mine wears a pair of Groucho glasses. On August 8th, my husband and partner of twenty years died of stomach cancer. Our eldest turned 13 three days before he died. Our youngest was 11. Those are some of the facts. Everything else, is experience. Trying to describe my experience,… Read more »