“Hold steady for three seconds.” Click.

K: a mouse house?

Me: a message to Satan?

Differing points of view.

Here’s a worthy point of view.

A gentle soul just convinced me that Danny’s message “you did your best” was unambiguously positive.

I wake at 5:45

into his absence. Or at 6:30. Or at 7:12.

“You’re in shock,” we keep getting told. “You’re in shock.” I’m not sure I know what that means but one hint is how skewed time is — the calendar has almost no meaning.

What do you mean it’s less than three weeks till May 1? I thought it was a month and a half from now. When did I travel to Colorado? When did I get back? Wasn’t it like two months ago? Has it even been a month since he took his life?

No. Not even one month.

That’s in four days. THAT point in time is rock hard clear.

The number of times I can’t find my phone throughout any given day has easily doubled. Is this what they call grief fog?

At lunch, I cry. On the phone with BZ in the evening, I cry. After breakfast, writing three thank you notes, I cry. Talking to a neighbor on the curb about her father’s suicide, I cry. Lying down to sleep for the night, I cry.

I try not to think about that last day because it’s so traumatizing, but even to remember ordinary days with him in them, ordinary memories of a family of four, creates a different kind of agony.

Today I will drive 28 minutes north and talk to a book group about The Weight of Cloth. I’m bringing some indigo-dyed cloth. I’m bringing a pile of books that I consulted for research. I am bringing a determination to let the two hours serve as a healthy distraction.

I must end with gratitude. The cards, flowers, food and offers for food keep arriving. It’s astonishing, really. Thank you Kim. Thank you Risa and Kris, Pamela and Joel, Ellen. Thank you Barbara and Candy. Thank you Mark and Ruthann and Brenda. Thank you Diane. That’s just the last few days!

Note: at this point, people are apologizing for responding “late.” In this realm of communication, there is no “late.” A card with beautiful remembrances of Danny will be welcome any day from now until my last day and arriving on an otherwise quiet mail day turns out to be rather perfect timing.

This list was compiled on a dog walk a week ago.

Sights our Danny won’t see again: telephone poles, pine cones, his brother, a plate of scrambled eggs that I’ve made for him, the Flatirons, Ella, his own face in the mirror, his father’s face, a 6-inch rainbow trout resting in the palm of his hand.

4/4/26

Yesterday’s comments arrived in my mailbox as a series of small miracles. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Advice to the grieving can be at once risible and wise. Take for example the advice to get a hobby. 

Get a hobby?

Can you imagine shopping for supplies, trying to learn techniques you’ve never done before, sorting out where to work on your project and where to put all those supplies in your house when you’re not working on it   — all while in the throes of grief?

Which is to say, I feel gratitude that I already having a hobby (though for some reason I never call my quilting that). 

To have supplies, lots of supplies, to have established places where those supplies live, to have techniques I’ve practiced for decades — these are truly things to be grateful for. Quilting. It goes on. I go on.

But here’s an example of how even a semi-distracting hobby never takes you far from the person you lost.

This morning, I decided this beast of an Epstein Quilt needed basting down. I’m sick of my thread getting caught on all the pins. I’m sick of my fabric squares shifting around. I should’ve done this last week but here I am.

In the process of basting the layers, I stitched the quilt to my pajama bottoms. It happens.

But here’s the thing. The last time it happened, I was in Longmont and Danny was sitting across from me. I lifted the little house quilt up from my lap to reveal a V-shape of thread where the quilt was attached to my pants and he smiled.

This morning when I lifted up this quilt to find myself threaded to my pj bottoms, it occurred to me: the last time I did this, it made Danny smile.

And then: that was probably the last time I saw him smile. 

So much for the so-called distractions of a hobby.

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