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Live Children
The worst times for me seem to be when I lie down to fall asleep and when I wake up between sleep cycles in the middle of the night. I just start thinking about Sarah and I start crying. I’m not even really sure what I’m thinking about. I’m so afraid that Sarah is becoming a concept rather than a person now. That we are not newly bereaved but are starting to accept her loss and adapt to it. I guess we are supposed to do that, but it feels wrong.
I don’t want to enshrine Sarah like some sort of perfectly wonderful child, some ray of sunshine that blessed our lives. I just want to hold on to her, to hold on to our family and our normal everyday lives a little bit. The other day I was shopping at Aldi and a little boy stopped and held the door for me although it was an automatic door and was open anyway. He was wearing a Pringles Potato Chip can on his arm like armor and I figured he was engaging in some fantasy play. “Thank you, Mr. Strong Arm Man,” I told him. It’s so fun to me to see kids engage in this stuff and really it was the best part of family life, Max and I being the producers, directors, and crew of Sarah’s fantasy play with her Minions, stuffies and other toys. I miss it so much.
I don’t want to become one of those creepy old ladies who goes around like a groomer interacting with kids in public and trying to talk to them. But I tell myself it’s okay to interact with children sometimes, that I’m not some pariah marked “Dead Child” (or Valhomah) who has to keep away from real live children. I’m not a danger to their lives, although I feel like I am. And it doesn’t dishonor Sarah’s memory if I have a little laugh about them.
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Bumpers
Buzzfeed helpfully offered a quiz this morning to help me figure out which psychological complex I have. The results were not exactly earthshaking. I have a Guilt Complex which includes “feelings of unworthiness” and a tendency to “put others needs before my own.” I need to develop self-compassion and prioritize my well-being, etc., etc. Okay, chatbot, well played.
But there is another side of me that is stubborn and quite tenacious, and can sometimes come across as arrogant. It’s gotten me into trouble too, and caused a lot of internal conflict when I assert myself about something I think is worth standing up for. I’m not sure I always do it gracefully. That’s the problem with anxiety. It gets you both coming and going. I read somewhere a few years back that anxiety and anger ride together on the same train, and I think that’s definitely true.
My anger sometimes flared up when I felt that Sarah was not being treated well or was being treated in an ableist fashion. Sarah did not really like these episodes of my assertive anger or appreciate them. I felt it was important that she not be taken for granted and that the world make space for her, but she was just a little girl who wanted everyone to be her friend. There was an incident with the class PTA where a getting-to-know-you fall outing was planned at the local bowling alley for all families. The only problem was the local bowling alley was down a flight of stairs in the basement of the building and there was no elevator. I posted on the class listserv after the outing was announced and asked (obligated) that it be moved to a second bowling alley, slightly further away, that was wheelchair accessible and also had bumpers for the balls, and racks that Sarah could roll the ball down. She actually really liked bowling with these accommodations. I was strident. The PTA mom who had arranged the outing took offense and refused to participate from then on. It became something of a cause celebre.
It was “too late” to move the outing and get the group’s deposit back and we ended up carrying Sarah and her chair down the stairs and I remember sitting stiffly with a smile pasted on my face thinking, “Well, I managed to screw up this school year.” My anger always seemed to screw things up even if I felt my cause was just.
I’ve always been motivated by wanting to help people and also by a strong sense of justice. I guess that’s what ultimately sent me to law school. I studied for the GRE in Psychology to enter a graduate program but it was all rat mazes and electrons and I was really turned off. I applied to social work school and was accepted, but my mother, who was a social worker, had so many negative feelings about being a social worker (and everything else) that I deferred for two years and worked for a while after college. I remember I saw the Errol Morris film The Thin Blue Line when it came out in 1988 and it just galvinized me. It’s a shocking documentary of injustice and if you haven’t seen it, you should. I saw it several more times and around that time, my Dad offered to pay for me to take an LSAT prep course. I did quite well; I’ve always been a good tester, and I ended up in law school. And I ended up being Sarah’s mom.
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Backwards Day
My parents sent my brother and me to a summer day camp for several years during the 1970’s that stood out to me as more and more unusual in my memories while I was raising Sarah. Camp Elbanobscot was run by liberal Jews like my parents, and it was religiously and racially integrated, but evenmore so it also accepted children with all sorts of disabilities, which was very rare if not unheard of during this era. This was before the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in November 1975 and way before the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1991. Nevertheless, there were kids with cerebral palsy, kids with what we called “mental retardation,” and kids on the autism spectrum who were referred to as “emotionally disturbed” in the parlance of the day. There were also kids who relied on hearing aids and canes and so forth.
To my recollection, there was no “sitting down moment” where I was told I was going to camp with kids with disabilities by my parents or by the counselors; kids with disabilities were in my cabin and in my carpool, and that was that. It was simply part of camp. Some days it seemed to work better than others. There was one particularly awful day when the camp celebrated “Backwards Day” and the schedule ran backwards chronologically and we all wore our clothes backward, to the delight of everyone but “George,” the emotionally disturbed (autistic) boy in my carpool, who had to be picked up early by his mother after an epic meltdown. It was not a good recipe for a kid with a lot of rigidity issues.
Mostly I thought of the kids as individuals, not diagnoses. There was Debbie, who was “mentally retarded,” and her older sister Susan, who were in my carpool. Susan spent a lot of her time explaining things to Debbie and monitoring her. There was Linda, who was in my cabin, who had CP, and liked to walk next to one of the other girls, holding hands. She also liked to have one of us come into the port-a-potties with her. Some days we partnered with Linda as if it were a badge of honor to help her, and some days we found her annoying. There was a deaf girl, Anna, who had cool hearing aids strapped to her chest that sometimes needed recalibrating by the head counselor.
There were also swimming tests, canoeing, overnights, mosquitos, badges, arts and crafts, cookouts, braiding keychains with plastic threads, and the usual camp stuff. I guess I would probably not have thought much about my years at Camp Elbanobscot if I had not had a child with disabilities. It seems very unusual to me now that I had this experience growing up in the 1970’s, and I’m frankly glad I did. There seems to be a tendency among adults these days to think that there is, very suddenly, a huge influx of disabled children in the United States, and that these children have just popped up out of nowhere, or are being overdiagnosed. But such children definitely existed in the 1970s. They just weren’t accepted at regular schools and summer camps and you didn’t see them at your friend’s houses. And of course, rather than being called “autistic” or “disabled,” they were called “emotionally disturbed” and “mentally retarded.” (Side note: I think until I was about 20, and seriously studying Developmental Psychology, I thought that the term “emotionally disturbed” was an actual psych diagnosis or term that was used by clinicians. “Is she emotionally disturbed?” I would ask, for example, about someone’s sister if they sounded on the Spectrum. It made for some odd conversations.)
Sarah did go to an excellent inclusive day camp that accepted a small number of children with disabilities for which it could provide one-to-one aides and for which we were on a waiting list for a long time, and had to provide reams of documentation. She loved Camp JCC and had some great times there. I’m glad we both went to camp.
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I-Village
Yesterday turned into a beast of a day. I was emotional after doing my writing, and stirred up by its angry undertone and my recounting of the “ableist” responses to Sarah’s death. Anger is a hard emotion for me to wrestle with. Then later on yesterday I found a big cache of old photos and some videos of Sarah hidden on a part of my computer where I didn’t know they were stored, and of course I had to compulsively review, watch, and sort all of them. I love looking at photos of her but it can be so painful too. Those pants! How did I forget about those little purple flowered pants she loved to wear! Or that year that she kept breaking out so much around her mouth with eczema, why weren’t we more attentive to that?
It was a day of sadness and reminiscence, plus people were commenting on the anti-ableist part of my post, and that drew me back continually into musing about the people who have not dealt with Sarah’s disability very well, and how I have not dealt with them very well. Or just how I suck at dealing with my own negative feelings.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when Sarah was an infant, I belonged to an on-line mothers’ support group. It was on I-Village, a now largely defunct website that used to run monthly expecting clubs where women would create groups with names like “The May 2006 Mamacitas” and we would all post about our pregnancies and then after the kids were born, their development. A core group hung on and we posted all the time but I remember how anxious I was when Sarah wasn’t sitting up, crawling, walking, playing “Sooo big” and so forth along with the rest of the cohort.
I started virtually hanging around with another group member, let’s call her PG, and we seemed, without planning or discussing it, to undertake a kind of guerilla campaign of undermining some of the “star” mother/baby pairs, the most advanced kids and the most self-assured mothers. We would post post post right after a photo of little Gemma riding her tricycle by herself, to knock the post down the page. We would start nonsense posts about nothing, in order to draw attention from big posts about the baby superstars and their goings-on and posts like “My pediatrician thinks Zayden may be a genius.” I don’t know what PG’s excuse was, but I couldn’t handle this kind of ruthless baby competitiveness and showoffiness. I was too unsure of myself as a mother and too worried about my baby’s development.
It didn’t take long for PG and me to be noticed in our commando attacks on the civilian populus of the message board. I was subsequently banned from I-Village, something I was both deeply ashamed of and secretly thrilled about. I still have a few friends from there (and their 17 year-old babies) that I keep up with to this day, but not PG.
Last night Max and I attended our grief group. It was the first time the group has met in person since 2020 and the return to a conference room was carefully arranged to occur once per quarter balanced with Zoom meetings the rest of the time. Max and I weren’t sure we would make it, because it meant a late night drive home, and I’ve been going to bed so early lately. But we decided to make a kind of date night in Rockville, to go to a new restaurant, do some shopping, and go the group. We had a very nice dinner and a little thrift store shopping and headed over to the group.
A lot of the group members knew each other before the pandemic and recognized each other by sight. They were chatting around the conference table before the group started, as the leader was still in the lobby greeting arrivals. The conversation was about one group member’s 16 year old daughter, how tough it was right now, how moody she was, how the father was her favorite so he was lucky he could deal with her outbursts, and so on and so forth. I just felt a rising tide of anger and sadness washing over me. I remember looking at Max and he put his hand on my shoulder. I spoke up. I was not nice. I said we had lost a sixteen year old daughter and this small talk was very painful. Max added that she was our only child. One of the people speaking in the group got up and left the room. Max and I decided we had overreached and we needed to head home. We’ll try the grief group again next time, when it’s on Zoom again.
I really don’t deal with anger well, especially when it comes from a place of jealousy or resentment. I guess that it’s fortune cookie logic to think that there are people who bear up really superbly well when feeling jealousy and resentment. These are not emotions that bring out the best in people. The most we can hope for is a graceful exit or a grin and bear it. I do know that I slept well, finally, last night, until about 6 a.m., rather than waking up at 3 in the morning as I have been doing. Maybe something needed to be expressed.
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The Ferryman
I loved logic puzzles and games when I was growing up. I liked to figure out how to get everyone from one side of the river bank to the other safely, or which of five friends must have been wearing the purple hat and red shoes, and so forth. I especially liked when there was a sort of secondary element to the game. Like when you successfully moved all the animals, people, and personnel across the river, and then the game gave you an analysis of your opening salvo or strategy and a mini-personality profile. “You had the goats and the ferryman crossing together. This shows that you are uniquely creative but sensitive to critical remarks by others.” Or some such pablum. If I didn’t like my personality analysis, I could re-solve and get a different one. “The old woman and the chickens crossed together. You are a born leader who will strive to achieve.”
Right now I feel like I’m trying to solve my grief and Sarah’s death like some sort of puzzle and looking for clues to my future role to pop out and present themselves like fortune cookies. It’s not really working that well for me. A big obstacle is my compulsive tendencies. My internal monologue says constantly “Move along, move along, make goals, stick to a structure.” But the rest of my brain continues to perseverate and to cry at unpredictable times and to be consumed with thoughts of Sarah and our family life. I guess I’m just still deep in grief and that’s my identity right now.
A big reason why I started writing about Sarah and our family — and I don’t wish or need to call anyone out — is that in the immediate aftermath of Sarah’s death, a couple of people asked me, while conveying their condolences, if Sarah’s death was a relief to me. I was pretty stunned. I can understand from the viewpoint of an outsider that raising a severely disabled child is not a picnic and that we had to devote our lives to Sarah’s care. But would you ask a parent of a typical child if they were relieved if that child died? “Your son was shot last night by the police, you must be so relieved!” “I heard that little Aidan didn’t make it through her ear tube surgery, aren’t you relieved?”
I wanted the world to understand how wonderful Sarah was, how much we loved our family life, and how deeply and profoundly she would be missed, not in spite of her disabilities, but because of them as well as all her other marvelous personality traits. We are not relieved by her absence. We are devoid.
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Kindred
When I was in my first year of high school, the movie Carrie opened and my parents forbid my teen brother and me from seeing it. This was pretty rare for our parents; they were laissez faire about most things and did not have a lot of rules, and we had seen The Omen and The Exorcist previously anyway. But after seeing Carrie in the theater, Mom and Dad believed that a scene in which Carrie is taunted by other girls when she starts to menstruate in gym class could raise subtle psychological issues in us that we somehow wouldn’t know how to handle or voice. At the time, I thought their reasoning was a little silly, but I really didn’t have any interest in the movie to begin with, and I didn’t care much either way about their fatwa.
My brother Jonathan, on the other hand, ran with a cool gang of kids who often went to popular teen movies and other such events, and he bitterly resented Mom and Dad’s interference and the possibility that he might have to forego a Carrie outing. The issue was litigated several times in our house by him.
Fast forward about eighteen months. Jon and I were now about 16 and 17, and Carrie came on broadcast television for perhaps the first time or second time. As I was flipping channels, I caught a few minutes of it. My (soon-to-be-lawyer) brother observed this, and immediately summoned my parents to the living room for full oral argument on an emergency stay of my activities.
In the most strident terms, my brother asserted that my Carrie television-watching was prima facie evidence of household disaparate treatment and failure to consistently apply rules and regulations, leading to the inexorable conclusion that I, the younger sister, was the clear beneficiary of parental favoritism. As relief, he demanded that I immediately be barred from watching Carrie just as he had been barred. My parents hemmed and hawed. As I was now 16, they felt that their duty to protect me from the ‘disturbing’ menstruation taunting scene was really negligible at this point. And moreover, the TV movie was way past that scene anyway chronologically. (Apparently no one cared about the gory prom slaughter or buckets of blood dropping on Carrie). But my father, laughing, agreed to forbid me to watch the show. And I obediently found something else on instead, probably Knots Landing or some other 1980’s nonsense.
This family episode, which always makes me laugh when I think about it, sometimes makes me wonder and reflect on whether Max and I were right to deny Sarah the joys of the petty resentments, competitiveness, jealousies, and sometimes body blows that go with having a sibling. She wanted a sibling early on; it was one of the things she expressed to us when she got her first communication device, her Vantage Vanguard, at age 3. We asked her what she wanted most, and she said “Baby Brother.”
It would have been nice to produce a baby brother for Sarah. I fantasized a sweet, supportive kid named Sam or Theo who could have been a best friend/protector type and helped break the social ice in the neighborhood, at the pool, and really everywhere we went. However, I also remember a few days after Sarah was born, when we first got home from the hospital and Max was probably still running on adrenaline, he said to me “We should definitely have another baby.” I just stared at him like he was high on crack. My body felt completely outprocessed, like every cell had been taken to produce Sarah. I was supposed to do that again?? And this is before we knew she had special needs. After we knew that we were chasing a genetic diagnosis, we felt too unsure of ourselves to try again. And frankly, my fantasies of a little boy to support and defend Sarah felt too selfish. Not enough of his own activities, his own development, his own personality.
So Sarah did not have the fun (or pain) of sibling rivalry. We used to say “Once you’ve had the best, why bother with the rest?” about her only child status. She was everything.
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Comfort Inn
When Sarah was six years old and younger, our area experienced regular power outages during storms, especially winter snowstorms. Washington D.C. isn’t exactly known for its rugged response to the weather. The government and the schools here have traditionally closed at the drop of a hat, sometimes even pre-emptively closing or announcing a delayed start of several hours if snowy or even unusally windy or frigid weather is expected. We are not tough, and many people have called this a Southern town.
The problem was compounded when Sarah was really little by the fact that utility lines here are not buried, but are outside and run from pole-to-pole down the street. We also have a huge tree canopy around here that we love and are very proud of, but whenever it snows or ices over or the wind blows, tree branches fall and knock down power lines, and the power goes out. It used to go out for days sometimes, but finally PEPCO got its act together and began doing some heavy duty tree-clearing and line maintenance after the 2012 Derecho, which had us in a hotel for a week along with the rest of our county.
We had similar but shorter hotel stays during the 2010 “Snowmageddon” (the local name for back-to-back snowstorms that brought several feet of snow) and a couple of other earlier power losses that lasted overnight. My parents took to asking us if we had hotel reservations whenever snow was forecast. We didn’t really find it funny. It was a good thing Sarah was still very small and easily carried the half-mile or so from our home to one of the downtown hotels through the snow (or the muggy heat of the Derecho).
It was a little scary for her when the power went out if she were awake, especially if it wasn’t completely light outside. She would gasp, and give a little cry, and look around for us. I would run over if I weren’t next to her, and hold her hand, and explain that the lights went out, and that we were having an adventure, and Max would be looking for the flashlights and the candles and so forth and we’d call PEPCO to get some sort of estimated waiting time for repair.
If the temperature were falling (or rising) too much in the house, we booked a hotel, or made a reservation we could cancel. Sarah’s condition made it difficult for her to regulate her body temperature. Often one leg and one arm would be freezing cold, and one leg and one arm would be hot. We didn’t want to take any risks with her by toughing it out in an unheated or very hot house, and let’s face it, we were wimps too.
During these times of power outages, and then later during the Pandemic shutdown too, I had a little motto or adage that I would tell Sarah sometimes if she were frightened. I would say that our family was “Always together, always safe, always having fun.” She would smile when I said this and it seemed to comfort her. During the first Pandemic shutdown in 2020, I even made an outline drawing of our hands – Max’s, Sarah’s, and mine – and wrote those words underneath it and put it on the wall where she could see it for extra reassurance. It reassured me too. How I wish it were true.
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Raisin Bagel
Yesterday I found myself craving and eating a lot of carby food in the middle of the day. A big bowl of popcorn. A raisin bagel. Pretzels. Not sure why. It was a deviation from my “healthful way of eating” that I’ve been on since January (although I did take a break during our trip to the UK and basically made a habit of afternoon tea with a fruit scone and butter or clotted cream. Mmmm.) This healthful eating follows our weight gain during the fall after Sarah died when we stuffed our faces. See my post “Staging My Grief” for more about that.
As you know I tend to overanalyze everything, and drive myself nuts in the process, and I’m not sure what was worse, the carb-loading or my perseveration and excruciating overanalysis of it. I encountered Max in the house post-bagel and I announced “I just ate a raisin bagel!” as if I were Ethel Rosenberg and I guess I expected him to be Roy Cohn. He calmly remarked “You wanted a raisin bagel, and so you ate one.” Yeah, that about sums up my transgression.
My relationship with food has always been screwed up (like so many American women), and I was afraid of passing that on to Sarah. Either by giving her weight issues in her youth, like I had, or an eating disorder in her adolescence and young adulthood, like I had, or by just not knowing what and how much to feed her, ever.
Max took over Sarah’s feeding once she started solids at eight months or so and it was a huge relief to me. He said he took on the responsibility because I breastfed her for 19 months and he considered it “his turn” but I was terrified to feed her solid food. I felt like I had no idea how to accomplish it, as if Sarah weren’t human at all but some unknown species. Max and our nanny Alba started her on solids, and around Age One it seemed to me Sarah ate as much as a longshoreman or truckdriver. For dinner, she would eat a jarred baby food meat or some kind of stew, plus several vegetables, followed by fruit, and also pudding, and then wash it all down with either a full bottle of milk or by breastfeeding. I was astounded.
Then as Sarah grew into toddlerhood she began having more and more issues with swallowing and couldn’t handle any foods like sandwiches, chewy meat, or hard cookies. Her feeding sessions took longer and longer, up to two hours sometimes, until Max determined she’d consumed enough calories, and sometimes there would be tears and a struggle, the mirror opposite of the weight and food battles I experienced when I was a child at home.
Sarah benefitted from kindergarten through third grade from the fact that her schools qualified for a free breakfast from the county, so Max would feed her one breakfast at home and then a couple of hours later she would have a second breakfast at school fed to her by her aide, which buffed up her calorie count. Her physical therapist Becky Leonard also developed a protocol for us to feed Sarah and showed us how to position her head and neck for optimal tongue and muscle placement, which was immensely helpful. But eventually we made the decision as a family to go with tube feeding. Sarah was a hundred percent for it and it was absolutely the right choice for us. She gained weight immediately and it took so much pressure off her.
I wish I could take some pressure off myself too, and not beat myself up so badly for having a few carby snacks. I was a little sad yesterday, after reviewing a lot of Sarah’s writing. There was a piece she wrote about balloons, where she went through each month of the year and explained what days should be celebrated and with what kind of balloons, and in the piece she also talked about having balloons on her 17th and 18th birthdays, and I thought ‘Oh my love, you will never be 17 or 18.’ It’s just so hard sometimes. Maybe I ate a raisin bagel because what I really wanted was my Tootsie Bagel.
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Superheroes
I’ve been looking through more of Sarah’s writing recently and really enjoying it. Sarah featured Max and me in a lot of her stories and non-fiction pieces. Emily, her tutor, mentioned to us at the Shiva that Sarah would usually present us as superheroes in her stories. We were high status for her.
Sarah wrote a story called I Love Mom that is of course especially meaningful for me. It’s not dated but I think it was a Mother’s Day effort the spring before she died. The story starts with a screenshot of a greeting card that says on the cover “Close together or far apart, you’re forever in my heart.” This page always makes me have a little cry when I read it now.
She talks about the various places and circumstances where she loves me, including dancing, at the beach, and when I give her money. Sarah was very money-oriented, which was funny because all her wants were paid for and she had no ability to physically handle money. But she absolutely loved being given gifts of money and was always open to being bribed with a dollar or two to do something she didn’t want to, which cash she would spirit away in one of two banks she had ordered on Amazon. Yes, I realize this is not primo parenting, but you have to work with what motivates your child.
The one page that I absolutely adore is this one:
It makes me feel so good about our relationship. Like we were just a natural match, and I was never on a trial period or undergoing double secret probation with her. We just clicked and we were good to go. I guess it’s silly to think of a tiny infant having the power to reject you, but I feel so grateful that she loved me from the start.
Sarah had very definite preferences right from the start; she never ever wanted a pacifier, which mystified our whole extended family. She did not like being bathed in the kitchen sink, something I loved as a little kid. She hated sleeping under warm blankets. I remember when she was a couple of days old, we were in the hospital together, and snuggling in bed, and the theme show music for Survivor came on television, and she was clearly listening for a second or two, and then she got the biggest smile on her face, as if she were saying “Mom, I’m so glad you watch this show too!”
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George Washington Bridge
My Dad is coming to visit us again in a couple of weeks. He’s thinking much more seriously about moving into a particular assisted living community, one fairly close to Max and me. So far Dad and I have been on two rounds of tours of such facilities, one in August in New York near the Taconic Parkway when Sarah died, and then one we took of facilities near the DC area a few months later last fall.
I see this as a parallel to the college (and law school) visits Dad and I did together many years ago. Dad didn’t go away to college back in the day; he attended Brooklyn College (and then Yale and MIT for grad school) so this is really my chance to launch him as he did me. We have an appointment to re-visit his top choice campus, which I’ll call “Swarthmore,” a really nice school with a lot going on, a nice mixture of diverse old kids and an appealingly active campus vibe. Dad already visited in October and liked it but was hesitant to make any commitment. He just wasn’t ready.
The facility he visited in New York in August, which I’ll call “Middlebury,” was very nice and full of bright old kids, but isolated, and I would say that you have to be totally into skiing to want to go there, which Dad is not. So he ruled that out. He has also ruled out some of the local places which I’ll call “George Washington,” “James Madison,” and “University of Virginia.” They were a bit generic, although perfectly pleasant, and the University of Virginia only offered kosher food which was not a plus.
So Dad’s first choice is Swarthmore and we are returning there to see if he really wants to enroll. I’ve been having a lot of flashbacks and ruminations lately to my own college application process. I don’t remember why I chose any of the colleges I applied to, and some of them, in hindsight, are senseless choices. I applied to Middlebury. No idea why; I have never skied in my life and don’t like very cold weather as a rule. Also lacked the grades to get in. Connecticut College. Had a horrible visit staying in a dorm with giant “Reagan” posters everywhere. Brandeis. Applied because it was near my aunt and uncle’s house. That’s all I remember. Oberlin. Actually wanted to go there, because I had a fun visit with some nice kids. Beloit. No earthly idea why I applied to this school; did I hear the name somewhere and think it sounded French or something? No clue.
Usually I try not to relitigate the past and the choices that got me where I am now. I did well in college and launched from there to law school, career, life etc. Nothing to bemoan. Maybe I’m chewing on this period of my life a little bit because I was 16 at the time of applying to college, and Sarah was 16 at the time she died. It feels like an unreasonably vulnerable and tender age to be making life choices and big changes. Why would we allow a 16 year-old to make such a sweeping decision?
When Dad and I drove to my scheduled overnight visit at Connecticut College, we headed out from New York City in our family’s Volkswagen over the George Washington Bridge, but our car started having trouble right when we were on top of the bridge. It conked out and died. It was a very memorable experience. We couldn’t get out of the car as traffic whizzed by us, we just had to sit tight and wait for traffic assistance to discover us (this was pre-cell phone). I remember I was scared, but I felt safe with my Dad. It was also a little bit exciting, like we were having an adventure. I hope Sarah felt this way too.
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The First Year Without Sarah 