There's something about turning 18, isn't there? A whole new list of adult things you get to do, places you can go, responsbilities you have. You can sign your own permission slips!  When a person turns 18, they think they're so old. And yet, the older I get, the more achingly young 18 seems to be. And yet...it's the 10th time we're celebrating Sam's birthday without him. Read that sentence again. The TENTH time. How can it be that we've done this ten times?  I read back over my old posts and I think about each year, how I wrote that we were just baffled by how the time had gone b ..read more

There's a whole culture now around creating a "streak." What's your Wordle streak? How many days in a row have you done the Mini Crossword? Did you close your watch rings all the days this month? I have a love-hate relationship with these streaks. I really like adding up all those numbers, but I also sometimes defiantly break my streaks so I'm not beholden to them. This week, I broke my Wordle streak but I hit a couple of high personal-high streaks - the crossword puzzle, Duolingo... Somehow, all of these coming together THIS week felt...like something. Because it made me think of the streak I ..read more

Dear Sammy, Possibly, you’d want to be called Sam at this point. Let’s start over.  Dear Sam, Nope. You're always going to be Sammy to me. Dear Sammy, Today you’d be 17. You’re not here, of course, but if you were….it would be a big party, I’m sure. Or maybe a small one? Just a few friends over for a special dinner.  You’d be deep in the throes of college prep, and filling out your application for Avodah. Would you be trying out for the musical? Or what about that French horn you might have asked for when you were 10, maybe you’d still be playing that. Or none of those. And you ..read more

It's been 2,886 days since Sam died. He was alive for 2,958 days. Those two numbers are remarkably similar. We had him physically with us just about as long as we haven't had him.  Today is his 16th birthday.  Several of our family members are currently binge-watching The Vampire Diaries (judge away, friends). Vampires are so interesting - they can live for hundreds of years. Of course, the show doesn't spend too much time on the existential questions about what it means to live forever...and yet, some episodes do address that deep question. What does it mean to fall in love and know ..read more

Today is Sam's birthday, and we've talked a lot about what he would have liked. Would he still like McDonald's? Would he still think dragons are cool? What would a high school Sam sound like, act like, think like? What would he think about politics, about food, about Minecraft? What would he think about music, about math, about books? What would he think about God? We have no idea. None.  He is totally frozen in time, as we move forward through it. Sometimes I make things up. I look at 15-year-olds and I close my eyes and I try to picture Sam in those situations, those stories, those ide ..read more

These last few months have been strange. For everyone. For the entire world. Everyone staying home, completely scared of a virus, washing their hands, wearing masks....it has also felt like deja vu. When Sam was in the hospital, each day felt something like this. A bubble, our own little world, trying to make normalcy amidst something totally out of whack. Our family talked about Sam a lot in the first few weeks of this strange quarantine, more than we usually do, remembering stories of how we kept ourselves entertained and how it felt to learn all the procedures to keep Sam safe.  I've a ..read more

Dear Sammy, Did you know that every time Solly walks by your name on the memorial board at the synagogue, he adds a stone? Every so often, I have to go over and un-pile his stones so that other people can use them too. And then he just piles them up again. It's almost like a game we play. Except we don't really talk about it. I just know that he does it. Maybe now he knows that I do it too. Your name is often on our lips. You'd think that after all this time, we might not talk about you regularly. But that's not true. We bring you up a lot. Sometimes it makes us cry. And sometimes it makes u ..read more