Everyone thought my grandfather was being a grinch for sitting alone outside in the freezing snow on Christmas Eve. They were wrong. He wasn’t hiding from the joy; he was guarding it. The year was 1998. I was twelve years old. Inside our suburban Ohio home, the scene was perfect. The fireplace was crackling, the […]

I found my father dead in his recliner, a lukewarm beer in his hand and that damn police scanner screaming static at full volume. I didn’t cry. I just reached over and finally turned it off. For fifteen years, that noise was the soundtrack of my resentment. Dad was a retired Fire Captain, a man

The night my dad told me our old dog was “waiting for your car to come home so he can die,” I thought he was being dramatic. Two hours later, I was driving through the dark with my hazards on because I couldn’t stop crying. I live in the city now, in a tiny apartment

My father died with exactly $18.63 in his checking account and a reputation for being the meanest son-of-a-gun in Trumbull County. I thought he gambled it away. Or maybe he just drank it away at the VFW hall. I was dead wrong. Walking into his house three days after the heart attack, the place smelled

They say freezing to death is supposed to be peaceful. Like drifting off into a heavy sleep. I’ve been driving these roads for forty years, and let me tell you—there is nothing peaceful about a house that has gone silent because the furnace died. There is nothing peaceful about seeing your own breath in a

I am technically committing a financial crime every morning at 4:15 AM. While the rest of the county is sleeping, I creep out of my back door in my bathrobe. I walk down the gravel driveway to my farm stand, look left and right to make sure the road is empty, and I stuff my

My mother spent my whole childhood saying, “I already ate at work.” Only later did I learn that “already” usually meant “not at all.” The night it finally hit me, I was forty-two, sitting in a fancy downtown restaurant. My coworkers were toasting my promotion. A steak lay in front of me that cost more

On the night I got written up for smuggling a greasy paper bag into the dementia unit, my boss said, “contraband.” I just looked at the man in the bed and thought, If this doesn’t work, Mr. Lewis is going to die hungry. Mr. Lewis hadn’t eaten real food in four days. On his chart

My supervisor wrote me up for bringing “contraband” into the memory care unit. She said I was breaking protocol. I told her I was just saving a man from starving to death. Mr. Frank hadn’t eaten in four days. In the medical charts, he was listed as an 82-year-old male with advanced Alzheimer’s and “combative

My heart didn’t break when the doctors told me my husband, Frank, was gone. It didn’t break when I had to sell the house we lived in for forty years because the stairs were getting too steep. No. My heart broke on a Tuesday afternoon, staring at a blue text bubble on an iPhone screen.