Life in Chicago

Irrevocable Changes

Sure, maybe it's just because I miss him. Or maybe it's that they really do have the same eye color. Or perhaps it's simply that my little daughter with her jowly cheeks and practically-bald head actually looks like an old man. Whatever the case, sometimes I look at Veronica and I get a flash-sense of my father.

It's surely not impossible that she could resemble him in spirit or even features, but the apathetic 17-year old in me tends to discard any such notions, insisting that it's just that I miss the man. I have to admit though that if there's anyone in my family whom I would want Veronica to be like it would be my father.

And I do miss him. Profoundly.

My father was 57 when I was born. He and my mother had been married for three years. She was forty and they had met late in life and had both been married twice before each other. My father had three grown children who were in their thirties and my mother had none.

My Dad grew up in Michigan during the depression. He was a bomber pilot in WWII, a prisoner of war in Germany and he came home a changed man. He made a lot of mistakes in his early life, wasn't always a great father or a great husband and he tended toward the self-important. But by the time he met my mother, he'd owned up to a lot of those faults and was well on his way to being an incredibly good man.

My mother helped him with that. She demanded that from him. And he from her. They made each other better people. The best marriages do that, I think.

My father loved to tell me how it was him who convinced my mother to have a child. He would lean back in his chair, swirling a glass of scotch and peering out over the bridge of his nose at me, his daughter, as he would tell me that he knew, just knew, that having a baby would irrevocably change my mother's life. 

Thinking back on those moments with him, the resolution in his voice, as my own little daughter entwines her fingers in my hair, I can't help but gasp with emotion for this great gift he gave her. And how wild that he would be up for having another child after he had already raised three.

But here I am.

It wasn't until after my mother died that he and I truly became close and that I really came to know him for the man he was. Oh, I loved him so much. He was such a good man by then. When my mother died I was eighteen and he was 77. We made an unlikely pair, but sometimes those are the best kinds of anything.

About a year after my mother died was when he moved to California from Atlanta, where we had all lived as a family. I was living in New York by then but I flew out to visit him often.

It was funny to see him living alone. Sometimes it was sad but a lot of the time it was just interesting. My mother had been such a force, dominating the household in all areas. It was her taste in art and furniture that filled the rooms. It was her cooking that found our table and her hobbies that took precedence over my father's.

He was living in Garden Grove,  a patch of Southern California about 45 minutes south of Los Angeles. He was familiar with the area having lived in Pasadena in the 1950s and the climate was good for his health. The modest, 2 bedroom condominium he took over from his deceased sister suited all his needs and was the place where I stayed and thought of as home in a way, when I visited from New York.

The condominium was in a little gated complex, a pool at its center, with a plethora of young families living all around him. In the mornings and afternoons the place was noisy with the sound of 7 and 8 year olds going to and from school. My dad often kept the front door open out of loneliness, and he would wave to the families from his perch at the kitchen table where he scanned the LA Times and sorted through catalogues.

When he moved into the condo he got rid of my aunt's outdated, avocado green sofas and heavy curtains and replaced them with slick blinds and a set of black leather couches. He hung modern art on the walls and put up large, framed photos of my mother everywhere. He even picked up a couple of lava lamps for the credenza, their place there by the front door never ceasing to make me laugh.

One month, after I'd sent him some essay I wrote in a college creative writing class about not having a home to go home to after my mother's death, I arrived for a visit to find that he had completely redecorated the guest room. A sign hung on the door that said, "Claire's Room" and inside he had put a pretty feminine comforter on the bed and had dug all my old stuffed animals out of storage to put in an armchair in the corner.

I was also surprised by how much my father suddenly began to cook. He looked up recipes on the NY Times website on a regular basis and was always trying out something new on me or his neighbors. He made apple pies and marbled breads, he made meaty lasagnas too and he even canned a bunch of strawberries one summer. Those seven years we had together after my mother died were unexpected and as each one slipped by I found myself more grateful for this time allotted to us, even if I wasn't always up for admitting that it was my mother's death that granted it.

I loved my father, loved him like I hadn't loved anyone before. I think as children we all love our parents unconditionally, but as we grow older and come to know them for the people we are we get to love them in a way of our choosing. It's a different kind of love than the obvious one we first feel. I never really got past that adolescent love I felt for my mother, not with her dying before I escaped adolescence.

I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. And maybe it really is because sometimes I look into Veronica's eyes and see his. She has the most remarkable blue eyes, but they're not the same blue as mine (a greenish-grey-blue or Greg's, a pale seagreen blue) and when I look into them long enough I get this inexplicable flash of my father.

But maybe it's something else entirely.

This morning I slipped quietly out of bed, careful not to jostle her milky, warm little body still curled under the covers and I tiptoed into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. It suddenly struck me that a little over a year ago I was waking up in the mornings with a feeling of ennui, with an unexplainable flatness. My life, even with all its love and adventure still felt dulled and heavy.

And I thought about that again this morning, after she had awoken and I was holding her in my arms, her little hands clasped around my neck, her face nuzzling into my neck as I spoke in soothing morning tones, my cheek brushing against her soft, downey head. The flatness has gone away. It's been gone for a long time. Life, these days, feels the opposite of flat.

And it was then that I knew, just knew, that my father, wherever he is, is happy for me.

Just Because

We had a really lovely weekend.

Yesterday was Greg's 31st birthday.  We started celebrating on Friday with a dinner with friends at Nightwood, officially my new favorite restaurant in Chicago. (Greg and I like to play this game where we ask each other what 3 restaurants we would return to if we moved away from Chicago and Lula is always my number one. Well, Nightwood is the latest feat by the Lula folks, so it was pretty incredible.)

On Saturday we drove out to the middle of Illinois and went hiking at Starved Rock Canyon. The drive was a little far and the canyon a little crowded but it was really nice to get outside and enjoy the fall leaves and crisp air. That night at home we ate tacos and watched Rosemary's Baby.

And yesterday was Greg's birthday. He shares his birthday with my father. My father would have been 89 yesterday (!). October 11 also happens to be my parent's wedding anniversary. They would have been married 34 years. My mother always said that she gave herself to my father as a birthday present and my father always said that she was the best gift he ever received. 

The three of us spent Sunday at home. I was in the kitchen for hours, working on a birthday cake and a lasagna to take to Greg's sister's house for dinner. Greg and Veronica spent most of the day following a football game on the computer and making each other laugh. And in the evening we had dinner with Greg's sister and her husband and their two kids.

It was a really nice weekend. The kind of weekend you dream about when life is giving you harder ones. It was the kind of weekend you wonder if you'll ever have again when you're dealing with a loved one who has an illness or when you've just gotten laid off from a job and you wonder if life will ever be normal again. It was the kind of weekend I used to dream about when my mother was throwing up from chemo or when I was brushing my father's dentures before giving him his nightly dose of morphine. Just one of those classic-life-is-good weekends.

And while I'm glad that my past experiences ensure that I appreciate these weekends more than I might otherwise, I also wish they didn't leave me with such a morbid edge to all things good. The more that I love Veronica, the more that I fear losing her. I remember going through this when I fell in love with Greg too. Before we were engaged and married I worried constantly that for some reason or another I wouldn't live to see those things happen. I used to beg some unseen force to please, please just let me live long enough to marry this man whom I love so dearly. And now I find myself begging again, please, please let me see my beautiful daughter grow up.

I don't know if this is normal. I don't know if my other mom friends experience this or if it's just a result of the loss I've experienced in my life. The moment I find myself loving something, I can't help but think of what it would feel like to lose it. I want to get past this. I want to be able to simply enjoy a perfect weekend, not because I know its opposite, but simply because.

Missing

V is going to see her grandparents today and they couldn't be more excited to get their hands on her. Greg's parents are wonderful grandparents. They're so involved and interested and generous. I think if we lived in the same city they would be over every day, wanting to spend time with Veronica and give us a break and even doing chores around our house. They adore their family and make all of us their number one priority. It's really quite amazing.

Veronica is their 5th grandchild and one of my sisters-in-law is due with number 6 at the end of this month. But you would never know that she's number 5. With each new one that comes along they act like it's the first all over again. I think Greg's dad tries to video chat us every night, just so they can sneak a peek at V. We prop her up in front of the webcam and she snorts and fidgets and fusses and they coo and clap at her through the screen. It's pretty endearing. I constantly feel lucky to have married into this family.

Still, every time I say "Veronica's grandparents" or tell her like I did this morning while she lay, smiling up at me from her changing pad, that she was going to see "her grandparents" this morning, something feels like it's missing. I think it's that when I say "grandparents" I am only referring to two people, not four.

Veronica will never know my parents. She'll never know what it's like to have them fuss over her or scoop her up after arriving from the airport. My father will never hold her on his lap and my mother will never teach her how to make cookies. She probably won't ever really think about them, except in an abstract kind of way, as mommy's parents who died a long time ago.

I wonder what kind of grandparents they would have been. I bet my dad would want to teach her weird tricks like he did with me -- funny card tricks where you fool someone into believing that you can guess every card in the deck or tips for how to hold your breath extra-long under water. My mom would make her dresses and knit sweaters and constantly send food in the mail. She would spend long hours in the kitchen, patiently letting Veronica experiment with recipes of her own fancy, letting her squirt food dyes into dubious cake mixtures and baking them, even though they're bound to be inedible. She would make treasure maps for her too, burning the edges of the paper for authenticity and hiding a bag of coins somewhere in the yard. 

I miss them not just for Veronica, but for me too. I miss the support and guidance and reassurance they could provide. I miss how they'd be proud of me for becoming a mom, a wife, a grown woman. I miss them for their smiles and wisdom and light and laughter -- all qualities I hope to see emerge in little bits of pieces through my daughter now and then. She'll know them, even if it's only by knowing herself.

Six Years Later

I began this blog a little over 6 years ago. Hard to believe, but true. I was 25 and living in Los Angeles. I had only been in LA for a year, having moved there from New York so that I could take care of my father who was dying.

I'd been out of undergrad for just over a year and had spent the first twelve months in LA working for various publications including Vanity Fair and Citysearch.com. But I wasn't writing much, other than freelance work, and I missed having a creative outlet. In June of that year (it was 2003) I read an article in the LA Times about a blogger named Julie Powell. She was living in New York and writing a food blog called the Julie/Julia Project wherein she was attempting to cook all of Julia Child's recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.

Sound familiar? It should since you can see this story in any major movie theater right now. I went yesterday to see Julie & Julia and watched Julie Powell's story play out on the big screen. It got me thinking about my own blog and about how and why I started writing here all those years ago.

It was actually reading about Julie's blog in the LA Times six years ago that was the inspiration for starting my own. In June of 2003 I joined Salon Blogs and created Life in LA. I took immediately to blogging. I loved having a reason to write regularly and I was captivated by the mystery of the Internet. It was fascinating to have strangers reading and responding to my writing and it drove me to work even harder on what I was putting out there. Although, looking back on those early entries I'm quite embarrassed by the quality and content.

When I began writing Life in LA my father was bed-ridden in his condo and dying of cancer under hospice care. I spent my days caring for him, brushing his dentures, giving him morphine and making funeral arrangements. It was an incredibly painful time in my life and being able to write about it every day was cathartic. I was confined to my father's condo and to the regiment of caring for him, so the blog quickly became my connection to the outside world, a kind of ether-space in which I could exist outside of my present situation. It was an escape from the sadness of my days.

I quickly began writing every day and with the growing fame of Julie Powell's blog more and more readers were checking out Salon Blogs, helping me to garner a small audience for myself. When my father died on August 5th of that summer I blogged about it. And for the next few weeks and months I wrote about my experience as a 25-year old woman with no parents. 

Blogging was a different thing for me back then. Most of my friends and family didn't even know that I had a blog. There was no Facebook or Twitter. I didn't even put photos up. It was just a place for me to purge. It was a place for me to release all the pain of what I was going through.

One night in October of that year my hits rocketed through the roof. Out of nowhere I went from having 60 or so readers to hundreds or thousands. Upon investigation I discovered that I had been mentioned in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. I was flabbergasted. The article was entitled The Worlds Best Blogs and it had come out in the print and online edition of the weekend paper. In Australia. My blog was the 4th one listed.

There's a scene in Julie & Julia where Julie Powell comes home after an article about her blog ran in the New York Times and there are dozens of messages on her answering machine from editors and publishers and magazines. My Sydney Morning Herald reaction was similar. I suddenly had thousands of people reading my blog. I received emails from agents and publishers and letters from readers. It was quite strange and thrilling and a bit overwhelming.

I began working with an agent in New York and with her help I wrote a book proposal that went out to all the major publishers in the industry. It was ultimately rejected, although I did come very close with an editor at Random House. Looking back I can see that I wasn't ready to write that book, a memoir about losing my parents, and that the proposal had been written more for the industry than for me. But still, it was a hard lesson to learn and a disappointing experience.

I quit writing altogether for a while after that. I quit freelance writing and I quit personal writing and I quit the blog. Looking back, I wish I hadn't. But at the time I needed space and anonymity and room to grieve. I didn't start the blog up again until the fall of 2006 and then I started writing all the time again. You can find the LA archives here.

Yesterday, watching Julie Powell's story play out in a movie theatre, I couldn't help but reflect on my own journey. I never really meant to become a blogger. It's such a commonplace and even a somewhat cliched thing to be these days. But when I started blogging six years ago it was still quite novel. It also helped that I had a definitive subject and theme. I wrote about my father's death and about grieving. But now, six years down the line, I'm just another person out there writing about my life. While I still enjoy it a great deal, I have to recognize it for the self-centered action it is.

I grew wistful yesterday watching Julie & Julia. An underlying current of the movie focuses on two women who want more than anything to publish books, and fame and success eventually come to both of them. It was at once heartening and dismaying for me to watch.

Truthfully, I always thought it would happen to me too. However vain it may sound, I always thought that I would end up with a book deal and a huge readership. And along the way I've been teased enough to keep holding out for my big moment. After the Sydney Morning Herald article I was also written about in Media Bistro and in the San Francisco Chronicle. But here I am, swiftly becoming yet another mommy blogger lost in the fray.

I have no intentions to quit writing here but all the same, I can't help but reflect on the last six years. What it all means and where it's going. Truthfully, I just don't know.

Letter

Yesterday, after I posted my two-month letter to V, I got a text from a friend saying that she was thinking about me. I racked my brains for a minute to figure out what was special about the day. And then I remembered. So I wrote another letter.

Dear Veronica,

I already wrote you a letter today, to commemorate your 2-month birthday, but then a friend reminded me that today is also the day that my father died 6 years ago. I had completely forgotten and was shocked to realize I had done so. And then I felt a kind of warmth at knowing that it's because of you that I'm not focusing on such sad events.

You woke up from a nap just a bit ago and were disoriented and startled so I held you in my arms in the rocker in your nursery until your breathing evened and your head fell softly against my chest. We were both quiet then and I could tell you were drifting off to sleep. I thought about that day 6 years ago when my father died and I couldn't help but cry, wiping my tears with one of your burp rags.

I wish so much that he were here to meet you today. He was the sweetest man, so kind and patient and really, truly wise. He would have loved to meet you.

My last days with him were so sweet and so sad. He died at home in his condo in California and I was there, taking care of him. We held hands a lot those last days and were quiet for long hours, sitting there together in the late afternoon gloom of his bedroom.

On the last day that he was truly conscious, he reached out his hand as I sat beside him and he touched my face. I closed my eyes and let him run his fingers over my cheeks and eyelids, my nose and chin. And only now do I understand what it must have felt like for him to do so. As I sit here with you in my arms, running my own fingers across your cheeks, it breaks my heart to imagine how I could ever do that knowing it would be the last time.

When he was finished my father looked at me and said, "Life is worth living," but it is only now, only since you have been in my life, that I truly understand what he must have felt in that moment.

Thank you for giving me that.

Love, Mom

Letter

Dear Baby,

It’s cold and rainy here today. I just got home from a million errands – to the craft store, Babies R Us, Jewel and Trader Joe’s. There’s only 7 weeks left in this pregnancy and I think I’m getting too big to be waddling about like this in the rain. I huffed and puffed my way into and out of the car, into and out of the stores, up and down the stairs with my bags, and now I’m finally home and on the couch, a glass of tea at hand, the dishwasher humming in the background. Your father will be home any minute and the cats are pacing back and forth across the living room as they wait for him.

I went to visit an elderly man today whose wife died on hospice last fall. They were married for 57 years and now he lives alone in their condo, making himself dinner for one each night and turning up the television in accordance with his hearing aid. We sat in his living room and talked for over an hour, both of my hands resting on my belly as you kicked around inside, all elbows and ankles today.

The man was only 5 years younger than my father, but still in his mid-eighties, and I listened to him tell me stories about his time in WWII for the better part of the hour. I think he was pleasantly surprised by my knowledge of the Army Air Corps and the different kinds of planes that were being flown in the early 1940s. He had applied to be a bombardier or navigator but ended up as a mechanic, working on the same kinds of planes my father flew. He said they all wanted to be pilots like my dad, but that it took a certain kind of man to earn that position. I swelled a little with pride for my father.

This man leaned back in his chair and told me all about being on boats with ten thousand other men, about being transported to New Guinea and then the Philippines. And again, I surprised him with my knowledge of those southeast Asian islands, both of us having been to Cebu where he was stationed for a time. His eyes welled up with tears on more than once occasion as he told me these stories, the sheer experience of it all overwhelming him.

I thought about you while I sat there, and how, by the time you are old enough to understand any of this, it’s likely that there will no longer be any living people left from WWII. And my dear, it truly was the last great war. It was the last time that people fought justly for a common cause. Not many people in my generation understand or think about WWII and even fewer in your generation will either, but I can hardly describe what it’s like to see a man like I did today, brought to tears, not by a sad story, but just by the enormity of what he did all those years ago. The meaning it gave his life is evident even today as he sits alone and lonely in his little condominium in the Illinois suburbs.

It made me miss my father very much. I hugged the man goodbye, again taking him by surprise, as he apologized to me for going on and on with his stories. I shook my head and told him how much I enjoyed getting to listen to him and then I walked down the hallway to the elevator, leaving him to close his door behind me, left alone with his thoughts.

I hope you get the chance to know your father like I knew mine.

Love,
Mom

My Father

I've been missing my Dad lately.

I thought about him for a while this morning when I was still lying in bed, unable to make myself get up just yet. I think I've been missing him because I've been feeling so anxious this week. For the second night in a row last night I woke up drenched in sweat after having a nightmare. I haven't been sleeping well. I've been having a hard time falling asleep and once I do, it's been hard to stay asleep.

I think I've just had too much on my mind lately. I've really been working an extra lot and a day hasn't gone by in weeks during which there hasn't constantly been some sort of work I need to be finishing. On top of that, I can't stop thinking about the baby coming and all the things we need to do to get ready and how we're going to handle my maternity leave and expenses and a million other things. I know that it will all work out, that it will all fall into place somehow, but I just can't stop worrying about it all.

And all of this is what leads me to thinking about my father. He was the most calming person I've ever met. He just exuded this zen understanding of life that always made me feel like, for one moment, I could calm down and set aside my anxieties and just be present. I don't think he was always that way. In fact, I know that when he was raising my much-older half siblings he was a stern and serious father, that he was quick to get angry and frustrated with them.

But something changed as he grew older and by the time he had me, at age 57, he was on a much gentler path. And he was particularly relaxed in the last decade of his life. It was like nothing could ruffle him. Not economic hardship or cancer or death -- you could tell that he simply viewed all of those things as part of the great flow of life. You could tell that he had learned, truly learned to give way to that flow, to simply be a part of it, rather than resist it, as so many of us try to do.

In the years following my mother's death, I would sometimes wake in the middle of the night or have a hard time going to sleep in the first place, and I would make my way to his room where I would sit on the edge of his bed and cry. He was always so gentle and sleepy on those nights, sitting up in bed under the covers, letting me cry and cry. He would listen to whatever it was that was bothering me and he would just nod. "I know, kiddo," he would say. "I know."

And that was all I ever needed. Just for  him to listen and for him to tell me that he understood. That yes, life can be hard and scary and terrible sometimes. Yes it can. So go ahead and cry for a while. But when you're done, you just keep moving forward again. It will sort itself out. That was always the message he exuded on those nights, even if he didn't say those exact words.

I wish I could talk to him now. I wish I could tell him all about married life and pregnancy and what it feels like to have the baby kicking inside of me. He'd be so delighted. I think he'd be happier for me than ever before. I know he knew that I would go on to have and do all these things and I know he knew how wonderful they would be but I still wish he were here to really witness it all.

I'm grateful that just thinking about what it would be like to talk to him about it all, gives me a similar sort of peace. He would see straight through all the worry and anxiety of things to come and only see all the goodness of it all...and that helps me see it again too.

Oh, I loved him so much.

December 17th

I'm usually better at remembering this date but it wasn't until I was at work yesterday and had to write down the day's date that I realized that it was December 17th.

December 17th is the anniversary of the day my father was shot down during WWII 64 years ago.

My Dad was the pilot of a B-24 Liberator and on December 17, 1944 he was on a mission to bomb the Odertal Oil Refineries in Germany. He and his crew took off out of Italy and about half-way to their destination, over the Czech Republic, they were attacked by a squadron of German P-38 fighters who shot down my father's plane.

Half of my Dad's crew was killed in an instant. The other half, five guys including my father, parachuted out of the burning plane to land in the Czech countryside. They were captured just hours later by German soldiers and my father and these other four men were were taken to a German prison camp on the Baltic Sea until the war ended 6 months later.

Every year for as long as I can remember my father has reserved December 17th as a day to remember not only the men who died that day, but to think about his life and the chance he got to live it to its fullest.

I felt guilty for not remembering until midway into my day, so caught up have I been in my own little drama. But it was a good reminder in that sense, to think about an event, a day so much bigger than the problems I'm currently facing.

It never ceases to amaze me how brave my father was. He was only 24 years old when he was shot out that plane, landing in a foreign country. And he never forgot it. He never stopped being grateful for his life. Up until his last breaths he was always aware of what a gift life is and he never overlooked the opportunity to make those around him aware of how he felt.

Last night we went to dinner at a friend's house and I told the story of how my father was shot down and we all raised a glass to him and his crew and I gave thanks for my life, just as he would have done.

5 Days

I slept heavily last night and, for the second night in a row, dreamed that Greg and I were fighting. We've actually never fought. Only once or twice have we even exchanged harsh words, and that was under extreme duress (re: moving), so these dreams have been unsettling.

It's just after 8AM on Tuesday morning. There are only sips left in my coffee cup, a length to-do list on my left and other scattered notebooks and papers across the dining room table. Greg and I have been taking on more freelance writing work than ever these days and we have a big deadline for the end of the month that seems almost laughable this week as we try to plan our wedding. Somehow though, it's all getting done.

Overall, I'm feeling quite calm about the act of getting married. I feel good about my vows and about all the effort I've put into the ceremony and the other meaningful aspects of the experience. I wonder what it will be like to be married. What it will be like to see a ring on Greg's finger, to call him my husband, to be referred to occasionally as Mrs. Boose. Wow.

Only two more days here in Chicago to get everything done. I made a program for the ceremony yesterday and we both found gifts for our attendants and families. I'm picking up my dress from the alteration shop today , getting a pedicure, and tonight some of my girlfriends are throwing me a little bridal get-together which I'm excited about. Every day when I come home there is another Crate & Barrel box on the front stoop and now they're all piled up in the living room by the fireplace. It feels weird to receive all these gifts and we're definitely not going to open them until we're married.

I still have moments in which I wish that everyone I know was going to be there on Saturday. But my gosh, I can't even imagine how stressful that would be -- this small ceremony is more than enough to think about. And the people that will be there are ever so important to us.

My half-brother Mike is coming, and made plans without hesitation, which I think is nice. He is my father's first child -- born in 1946 when my father was in prison camp in Germany during WWII. Mike is more than half my age, older than Greg's parents, I believe. He looks very much like my father and carries many of the same mannerisms. Mike has always looked out for me and taken special care to check in on me in the last few years. He's thrilled that I'm getting married and heartily approves of Greg.

When my father died I was the primary beneficiary of his estate and it was up to me to clean out and sell his condominium. I was twenty-five and quite alone in California. A couple of weeks after my father died I moved out of his condo and into an apartment in Venice Beach,where I lived for the last four years. Everyday for the first couple of months after he was gone I drove the 45 minutes to my father's quiet, darkened condo with the intention of beginning to go through his things. And every time I walked in the door I sank to my knees and began to sob, completely unable to bring myself to fulfill the task of sorting through and getting rid of all of his things.

It went on like this for weeks. Even now just the thought of that condo in the weeks after he was gone, makes me want to crawl under the dining room table on which I'm writing and curl into a ball.

Finally, I called my half-brother Mike and I told him what had been going on. He flew out the next weekend and in just a few days the two of us went through the entire condo together, packaging up and getting rid of everything that we didn't want. We even sold the condo that weekend. I'll always be forever grateful to him for that weekend.

I've asked him to walk me down the aisle.

Aloneness

Last night Greg went to dinner with his uncle and cousin and I opted to stay in by myself.

The second the door shut behind them, the house quiet except for the spatter of rain against the window panes, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I spent an evening at home alone. Greg and I have been living together for 4 months now and we haven't spent a night apart yet. The night before our wedding will be our first. We've certainly gone out independently of each other but I just haven't stayed in alone...not since I lived in my old place in Lincoln Park.

I sat for a while on the couch just being quiet and looking around the house. A home always feel different when you're alone -- the walls expand, the silence increases, the hours stretch on quietly before you. I thought about how sometimes this feeling used to strike fear into me, about how I could feel the whole world shifting out from underneath me when alone for too long a time. I thought about how, for so very long, I've felt disconnected and untied.

I remember those first moments after my father died. Letting go of his hand and walking away from his bedside, walking down the hallway of his condo, the carpet shushing underneath my feet. I walked outside to the little patio on which he always stood on Sunday mornings, watering his flowers. And I gently turned off the oxygen tank that sat in the corner. The machine hissed to a stop and the silence that was left was like a thing. I looked out across the rooves at the dusky California evening and I felt the whole world drop away from me.

Ever since that moment I've been struggling to regain myself. To at once reconnect in a meaningful way and to find a way to exist alone. I think that's what this blog has been about all along. What my life these past five years has been about.

And last night, sitting on the couch alone in the quiet house, I realized that I wasn't alone anymore. That Greg would be home in a couple of hours with members of his family and that the house would fill again with light and noise and love and that none of that is going away, that it will in fact, only increase. And that in a matter of weeks, I will commit myself to this man and this relationship -- to this deep meaningful connection that has been so deftly missing for so long.