Grief is weird when the world is normal. Everyone just goes about with their day, walking around, and sometimes the sun even has to audacity to shine, and when you are grieving, all of it feels like an insult. I told Rand once that I wished that human beings had chyrons – those little scrolling…
Six months into an interminable lockdown, I find myself missing the long dead. The throughline feels like a logical one – it’s a pandemic. Of course I’m thinking about death. Death and the post office. That took me slightly by surprise, even in a year where nothing has been what I’d imagined. I didn’t think…
We went to Germany, and I cried. Not right away. It wasn’t until the last day that I finally did. Rand asked if I wanted to rent a car to go down to see my father’s grave. He asked me in the early hours of the morning, when jet lag had us both exhausted but…
I am scheduled to leave for Germany in several days. I have already told my husband that I don’t want to go, in a whining tone that stretches syllables out so far that the words they once formed are barely recognizable. As a woman nearing the aging of forty, this is how I am coping…
By the time we land in Seattle, I am tired of people asking about the contents of the plastic toolbox. Both Rand and I have carried it from my father’s tiny Bavarian village to Munich to Amsterdam and now home, each of us now acutely aware of how ill-suited a container it is for transportation.…
The thing about time is that it moves on, even if you aren’t ready to. My father died last week. While I remain stuck, trying to grasp that fact, the days keep passing. I still hadn’t processed the statement “My father died today” or “My father died yesterday” before the clock had rendered them obsolete.…
It is a hot night in Milan. It reminds me of when I was in Cambodia. The next day I will look it up and find that it was, in fact, just as hot. Temperatures in the high nineties, the humidity hovering around 80%, nary a breeze to disturb the swarms of mosquitoes. On that night, the…
Father’s Day is always kind of tough for me. My dad lives in Germany, and has since before I can remember, so we don’t usually spend the holiday together. Normally, I just call him, and we have the sort of awkward exchange that only two people with virtually nothing in common – except for a…
My brother is in a new movie, and this time I found out about it on Facebook, rather than having to stalk his IMDB page like a peasant. This is the poster for it: YOU GUYS. It is a giant robot doing the Double Axe Handle wrestling move (yes, I looked it up) on a…
Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
by Geraldine DeRuiter
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