Warning: This post includes mentions of a suicide. If you are suffering from suicidal thoughts or emotional distress, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 via this toll-free number: 1-800-273-8255.

My goal for this diary was to write something at least twice a week. Something, anything, about being a woman who works and who is trying to fit in all the things that make life work. The idea that I’ve set goals for my diary entries says more about me than any story I may tell you. But still, a solid writing practice — diary or otherwise — depends on consistency. A daily habit. A thousand words first thing in the morning. But then, some days, first thing in the morning, or even mid afternoon, doesn’t work. You have the best of intentions, but life piles up on you. All the good stuff. The bad stuff. Heartbreaking stuff that leaves you buried in your couch, watching episode after episode of The Office, as if the deepest thought your mind can handle is the absurdity of work.

A week after my last post, my father in law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had not been feeling well and a doctor’s visit led to an emergency hospital admittance. This was the first weekend of May. Since then, he has been transferred to a new hospital and undergone a massive surgery that lasted more than four hours. Seventeen days later and he is still in the hospital.

The week after he was admitted to the hospital, I learned a friend had committed suicide. Just typing this resurfaces the grief, like pulling a Dear John letter you’ve read a hundred times from its envelope. My friend and I had talked on the phone two days before she did it, our first conversation in months. We had agreed to talk more often, send emails. Not knowing what had happened since we talked, I sent her an email four days later — two days too late.

During our call, she talked about the words she uses too much in her writing. Linoleum was one of them. She told me, “I’ve got to stop linoleum-ing all over the place.” I told her that was a fantastic line. In my email to her, I mentioned that I had looked up the word origin for linoleum and that it comes from the Latin words linum (which means ‘flax’) and oleum (which means oil). The word flax goes all the way back to a Greek word ‘plekein’ which means to plait or twist, like a braid.

“If ever there was a metaphor for mother-daughter relationships in their various levels of fucked-up-ness, to plait or twist would be a perfect summation. All of our mother/daughter shit twisted and plaited/braided together,” I wrote.

It turns out I found out about her suicide the day before Mother’s Day. It was a Saturday. The following day, Mother’s Day, I was going through a bag from Target, pulling out the cards and gifts my husband had bought for his mother and grandmother. One of the cards, a sympathy card, fell out of the bag.

“Oh shit, that one was supposed to be for you. I forgot to have the kids sign it,” he said.

Even though it read “Saying I’m sorry will never be enough” across the front, I thought it was a Mother’s Day card. Last year’s Mother’s Day had gone extraordinarily bad. We were nearly two months into our Covid lockdown and I had turned into a maniacal lunatic: Cooking every meal, wiping down surfaces with homemade disinfectant cleanser, setting up a bleaching station in the garage for our click-list grocery orders, fearing absolute worst case scenarios at every turn. I woke on Mother’s Day to find no cards, no gifts, no flowers and lost my ever-loving, doomsday-prepper mind. A month later, my kids went all out putting together a whole new Mother’s Day for me and began referring to the previous one as the Mother’s Day we no longer mention.

My best guess is the remnants of the Mothers-Day-we-no-longer-mention were still lurking because I believed the kids had picked out a sympathy card for my Mother’s day card.

“This is for me? For Mother’s Day?” I asked.

“No, not for Mother’s Day,” my husband looked at me unsure what to say next, “It’s a sympathy card … because you lost your friend.”

My friend would have laughed and laughed at the fact that I mistook a sympathy card meant to memorialize her death as my Mother’s Day card. It made me laugh too. And then it made me cry. Our dark humor was a thick thread that bound us — plaited us — together. I didn’t write that week, not even my morning pages, the one writing habit I’ve been able to stick with more so than any other. The following week, I started to get a few words down. I wrote about her. I wrote about the very first time I met her in Portland, Oregon, sitting next to her at a table with three other writers. We had all met online, but developed a deep friendship in the way writers do over emails and text threads, sharing stories we don’t tell anyone else. I remember we had been seated at a round table at the bottom of the steps, in the basement of a restaurant, when she turned to me and said something that changed my life forever. Something I still only share over texts and emails with friends I love. The last time I talked to her, I was in Portland, Maine. The literary symmetry is nearly too much.

Two days after my father in law’s surgery, not even two weeks after my friend’s suicide, I found myself in his hospital room on the 44th anniversary of my own dad’s death. As my father in law was going in and out of consciousness, his breathing tube still in place, I turned way from my husband and kids to stare out the window looking over Louisville’s landscape and let myself cry again.

Before I had a chance to recover from the waves of grief that kept hitting, my daughter’s prom showed up like a sunflower in the middle of discarded garden full of weeds. Weeks prior to my father in law’s diagnoses and my friend’s suicide, I had happily volunteered to host a pre-prom dinner for her and four of her friends at our house. Days out from the event, the offer felt a bit too much to manage after the emotional chaos of hospital visits and sympathy-cards-mistaken-for-Mother’s-Day-cards. Fuck it, I thought, I was going to host the prom dinner and it was going to be fun goddamnit.

And it was. It was so much fun. My daughter and her friends spending the day getting ready at our place. Fake eyelashes and gel-tipped nails. They had dinner in full make-up and sweats, waiting to put on their prom attire until right before the other parents showed up for pictures. In my room, helping my daughter into her prom dress, she asked me, “Mom, are you crying?”

I wasn’t, but I was close. The one thing about surviving trauma is that it can be difficult for the brain to distinguish between the highly emotional events that are happy and the highly emotional events that are sad. Your brain gets a charge and doesn’t know which bucket it belongs to. A sliver of difference between tears of joy and tears of heartache. I didn’t cry helping my daughter into her prom dress. There were no tears when she and her friends were all sitting around our dining room table with plates full of spaghetti, giggling with excitement about the night ahead of them. Not even a single tear was shed when the other moms showed up to take pictures.

But then, after everyone was gone and I had finished up the few leftover mozzarella sticks and put the dinner plates in the dishwasher, I sat down and started scrolling through all the pictures of my girl. So pretty, so happy, so ready for her first prom.

And then I cried some more.