Modern Love

Valerie passed this article on to me with a warning: I might not want to read it, depending on how I was feeling. It was about someone else’s experience of losing a child. And well-written.

So, after a delicious evening all to myself, tinkering with my manuscript, writing a review, reading some poems, and sweating through an unusually warm late-September night, I clicked the link.

The piece paralleled my own experience in so many ways, but what I recognized most was the moment before pressing send on a group email–at once the most efficient, but instinctively such an inappropriate medium–to update friends, family, and colleagues about the hard left turn our life had suddenly taken.

When we cleared out the shed recently, we burned the hundreds of printouts of email replies we gathered in those dream-like days that followed. Out of the domain of spam and chain letters came a sense of human communion. And in this article, I found a little more.