Our Cat has Nine Lives
This morning, Nick and I were talking about the fact that some people seem to be afraid to read Little Matches when a friend sent me a message: I hadn’t yet started LITTLE MATCHES because a friend’s son is dying of cancer, and I didn’t think I had the emotional capacity. Last night, however, your […]
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I asked some of Caitlin’s friends if they would want to write up a little something that I could put on my website. Here, Kenley describes Caitlin as only a lifelong best friend from childhood can. Someone recently asked me how I thought Caitlin might feel about Little Matches being out in the world. I […]
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Hello to every wonderful human who has been with me here since December, 2016. Your support sustained me, and encouraged me to write LITTLE MATCHES. And now… it is here. It is my greatest wish that it will inspire every reader to think deeply about life, and purpose, and about what’s really important at the […]
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Three years ago right now I was in Italy at a literary workshop. I had 25 pages of Little Matches written but I still I had no idea whether it would ever become a book. When I arrived home, I resumed my practice of setting a timer every day and sitting down to write “no […]
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I’ll just say this: as bad as 2020 was, for us it was nothing compared to 2016. I cannot believe it’s four years. Four. How? The knowledge makes my head spin like a small planet, like its moon — time moving inexorably forward forward forward yet tricking you with its revolutions, its constant circling back […]
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Update needed, as Caitlin would say. Three years ago today, on the 9-month anniversary of her lung transplant, during a walk around Walden Pond, I decided to start writing what I called “the Caitlin book.” I wasn’t even sure what kind of book it would be, or if I could manage to write it, but […]
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I thought that losing Caitlin taught me all there was to know about love and loss and “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” but with my mother newly departed from this earth, I’m reminded that life is constantly teaching, and my faulty human self always has more to learn. The practical side […]
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On New Year’s Day 10 years ago, I woke up to a text from Caitlin. She was still living independently and rarely talked about long-term survival, but transplant was looming. Transplant was on her mind, and it showed in that confession of uncertainty tucked inside the bigger message of optimism and love. She did see […]
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Thank you so much for the outpouring of caring. Reading all the notes made me teary and grateful for all of the wonderful people in my beautiful daughter’s life. I’ll try to update every day, but sometimes it might be hard. Things are changing quickly. After a traumatic couple of days, Caitlin was relatively stable […]
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At some point when I was little, my mom and I started referring to one another as our “mostly companion.” It probably grew out of the time I was having surgery when I was 11, and was in the hospital a lot. We would get overly tired, stressed, and…really silly. We were absurdly often at […]
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