YOU NEVER THINK IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU

Until it does.

The odds of losing a child before you lose yourself…by age 60, in US, is about one in ten.

I was only 45 on May 9, 1987, when it happened to me.

I am reading Fi: A Memoir of My Son, by Alexandra Fuller, whose son died at the same age my son did (21), 37 years ago. The quote above is from her book; It has been an accidental read--I saw it suggested at the bottom of the last kindle book I’d finished and having loved her other books, ordered this one.

Read more

ARE YOU OKAY?

A few weeks ago, Megan Markle, Dutchess of Sussex, asked this question in an op-ed column of the NYT, The Losses We Share. She wrote about the miscarriage she’d had and the terrible grief it brought. She spoke about what it had meant to her, while traveling with Harry in South Africa, exhausted and breastfeeding her first child, trying to keep up a brave front, to have a reporter ask her, “Are you okay?”

She answered that she was grateful to be asked, saying that not many had.

I’ve been pondering that question ever since, wanting to ask it to those of you who read these posts.

Answering it to myself.

Read more