run this amazing day

It started with Molly getting picky about her food. The details don't so much matter, but here we are anyway. I took her to the vet. A huge mass, an urgent surgery, the relief when the call came, we think we got it all!  And then. Another restless night, a pre-dawn trip to the emergency vet, a heart arrhythmia and cancer that had spread aggressively to her liver, everywhere, thieving away her last days, dying from the inside out. She came home, one last night. Four dogs tucked up in bed, her elephant snores, my eyes filling with tears again and again, unable to believe that we were here. We all went to the beach the next morning, shattered, a cruel litany in my head, this is the last time I will have four dogs at the beach/in the drive-thru getting them vanilla ice cream/on a walk/at the park/on the couch/under the sunshine/in my arms.  I wanted to bring her joy until those worst last moments, when I could help her quietly pass on. I stayed with her until the end, whispering, ...

People often ask, when I share that I lost another baby, how many is it for you, now?   I try to explain quickly, to get up-over-and-through the place where sharp shards of sympathy rake across the nothing that's left of my rotten and ruined heart. It's easier to speak lightly, to smile and change the subject, to pretend there's really no difference between losing three or four or five babies, as if at some point I can simply roll them all up together into one massive, tremulous loss, where the pain is no longer exponential but eerily familiar, the tick tock  of the grandfather clock, you're alone, you're alone, you’re alone, everything, always, on your own. I don't know how to talk about it; hell, I don't even know how to write about it anymore, my bothersome passion for snarky compound sentences and adverb abuse has completely deserted me. For months, there's been nothing but a cursor slowly blinking on a wretched blank page, because what could there p...

Here’s to jeans with a blazer, to furry barking happiness, to something in my life finally working out just a teeny tiny bit the way I hoped it might. Here’s to moving forward. Here’s to being brave enough to try, to leap, to love as deeply as I do. Here’s to getting back in the classroom, here’s to Annie sneezing sand in my face until the end of time,  here’s to a garden that’s bursting into life. Here’s to eternal sunsets over the ocean, here’s to letting the world change you, here’s to doctor Katie. Here’s to joy. 

Graham spent the first year of his life as an 'only child' dog. He didn't know how to bark until Molly showed up, fourteen pounds of absolute chaos that tried to pull his ears off and stole his toys and collapsed on top of him panting after romping madly and muddily through the backyard. In truth, I was afraid to bring her home, because I thought my love for Graham had taken up all the extra space available in my heart. I was worried that the only way to love her would be stealing some away from him. But what I've since shared with everyone who seeks out my counsel as the unofficial Should I Get Another Dog spokeswoman, and more importantly, what I've learned from the decade I've lived in Colorado, is that love doesn't work like that, boneheads. Love is an infinite resource, it is the most durable power in the world. It sounds overly simplistic, but it's true. Share it freely and more will twine up around you, love beams back, a joyful boomerang of plent...

Most people didn't even know that I was pregnant. In theory, that should have made it easier, when my baby died. Easier than when I miscarried my first, just shy of a year ago now. When I found out I was pregnant again, how I felt was complex. Lucky. Hesitant. Optimistic. Terrified. But it wasn't the fear that threatened to crush me. Anyone who has lived within this loss understands that it was the sudden and unnerving blaze of hope, swiftly followed by the immediate urge to stamp it out before Lucy could yank the football away. So I squashed down (most of) my gleeful blabbermouth tendencies. I had recently read something saying we should wait six months before sharing big news: a new job, moving across the country. Having a baby. I generally try to ignore random internet recommendations as I prefer to create my own senseless and complicated rules for life, but this one stuck. I'd keep it to myself. I'd nestle into cautious contentment and carry on carefully, carefully,...

Last year I climbed a mountain on Christmas Day. It's one of my favorite hidden backcountry wanders in Colorado. When I tell anyone about it, I say, I'm taking you to the top of the world.  I packed the car the night before and crept out well before dawn, snowshoes and pb&js, carols on the car stereo and coffee in Evergreen. I was parked at the rundown mine shaft by 6:30 and heading up the trail just as the sun started to rise. The first two miles are pretty flat but then it pitches upwards and the final push is about a quarter-mile which, depending on how deep the snow is, can take an hour or more. It's a slog. As the saying goes, they take pictures of mountain climbers at the top, not along the way, because who wants to remember the rest of it? The relentless climb, the searing burn in your lungs as the air thins, heart pounding wild and primitive while you trudge upwards, thick and slow. No one takes pictures of that, no one wants to remember the suffering once it...

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I won a talent competition at church. ( I've actually talked about this before, but any excuse to post this photo.) It was the first time in my life that I felt like  I had done something well. I was never going to be an opera star, or a rock star, or any kind of star, because to be truly excellent and rise to the absolute top, you need to have about seventeen different kinds of hammers in the toolbox you carry around inside your chest and I had only one.  I still have it, it sleeps quietly inside me, snoring softly, and I only ever really let it out to play when I'm alone in my car or the stairwell or a really excellent empty locker room. It's not the ability to really dig in and rip it, although any karaoke night anywhere will try and teach you otherwise. It's being able to blow the goddamn doors off the sucker, but almost never doing so. It's the other end of the continuum, the softness, the sensual gentleness that come...