The next deep breath
I sat slouched with the car in park. Ryan sat quietly next to me in the passenger seat, watching an existential crisis unfold. I stared at an opportunistic seagull perched on a light post, that waited for another exhausted mom to drop something halfway edible while she loaded her trunk in the parking lot. With eyes fixated and blurred with tears, rhetorically, I asked, "How? How is this our life? I don't recognize anything here. What in the actual hell?" After a long pause, Ryan, in all his impaired emotional intuition, replied, "The Apache Persuasion Hold! That's the hell!" Tears erupted into laughter. (If you haven't watched The Office , move on) In the time since his prognosis, we have found, in the most harrowing way, that this ache is chronic. That unextraordinary moment in the parking lot sums up our grief quite well. It's unnervingly and, yet, unsurprisingly erratic. I may be baggy eyed, subdued, and my soul bone tired but, of all the things