in logan's shoes

It’s September 17, 2019 and I am in physical therapy. Have you ever picked up individual marbles with your toes and transfer each one ever so carefully into a small Tupperware box six inches away? That’s my big physical and mental challenge for the week, other than getting around minus my left leg. A few […]

It’s August 20, 2019. After nearly 170 miles of backpacking in California’s high Sierra mountains, I finally see the tip of Mount Whitney above the lower peaks in the distance, thinking I will be on the edge of that 14,505 ft. mountain in a few days.  Feeling accomplished and invigorated by the physical and mental […]

Dear Tamara, I am so sorry you have experienced me full force.  I am the most painful when a parent loses a child.  I am relentless, ever present and I shred your heart to pieces.  I specialize in breaking you wide open to change you forever. I know you hated me at first.  You plunged […]

Dear Logan, Where the hell are you?  Damnit! I know I should be all spiritual, seeing visions of angels and feeling the goodness and awe of your signs in the afterlife. I am pissed because you are not here. Two years.  I haven’t seen you in two years.  I haven’t heard from you in two years. […]

Hope has taken on an entirely different meaning since the death of my only child, Logan. Forever 19-years-old. My life is morphing into two parts – before Logan and after Logan. While I am fundamentally the same person, the way I think has taken a seismic shift. Before Logan, hope was about the future. I […]

I used to think if my child died, I would not survive it. I would sell everything, leave home and fly to a remote third world county and bury myself in some cause to help others. Or I would become a raging drug addict to escape my pain and slip into utter oblivion. Or I […]

You were due on Christmas Day 1996, but you got too comfortable in the warmth of my belly and decided to wait it out another few weeks until the doctor had no choice but to induce labor because you were getting too big! I wanted so badly to have a natural birth, but your little […]

The sign came when I was in a Goodwill store looking for cheap pictures to cover my bare walls. I downsized from a four bedroom two-car garage house, that was no longer a home, in a typical grass-groomed suburbia neighborhood to a two bedroom apartment in middle one of the busiest tech centers in the […]

The firsts are beyond hard. Here comes another one, Mother’s Day.  What does Mother’s Day mean to a mom whose only child is dead? Am I still a mother? I won’t be getting any cards, well wishes, flowers, a big hug, kiss on the cheek or half-baked pancakes loaded with whip cream from my son […]

I hang on to everything I can find of Logan’s such as his pictures, his running shoes, his special shirts and his goal boards.  As I go through his room, I find written treasures tucked away in a book or crumpled up deep in a drawer. Today, I came across one of the first pieces […]