April 3, 2026 by suzanne day by day

Friday Randomosity: Various Kinds of Pain Edition

It’s Friday and my mind, as per usual, is scattered. Let’s try to shuffle some of the disarray into more manageable piles. (To be clear, by “shuffle” I mean “complain a lot about inconsequential things.”)

This week has been full of headaches. Literal headaches. Are they from neck tension? Eye strain? Allergies? Too much gum chewing? Not enough water consumption? WHO KNOWS. Advil seems to help, but I need to have something in my stomach before I take Advil (so says my physician husband) and I don’t like eating first thing in the morning and that’s when they are worst. Perhaps I should ask him, how much something do I need to eat? If, like, a handful of cashews would suffice, maybe I could deal with that.
While I’m whining about aches and pains, let me tell you that my forearm pain persists. The exercises in the video I told you about here helped tremendously, but then the pain returned. I have been babying it. Trying to avoid lifting things with that hand, eschewing weight lifting of any sort, trying to sleep on my back instead of on that arm. Stretches and the exercises that helped so much originally. (I think I may have been a little aggressive with the massage aspect of the exercises yesterday; my arm is kind of throbbing today, when normally it only hurts when I lift something.) Probably I should go to my doctor… but I have been resisting that step because I feel like she won’t be able to DO anything. Offer sympathy? Recommend rest, ice, and pain medication? The very best case (realistic) scenario is that she refers me to a forearm pain specialist… but then I have to make the appointment and wait to see that doctor and do whatever tests and yada yada blah blah blah. Why yes I am aware I am being a HUGE CRABBY BABY about this.
How are you staying fit if you can’t do your normal fitness routine? My preferred workout is strength training with weights. But I simply cannot do that right now. My second preference is for walking, but I find that lately my back hurts after I come in from a walk. What is THAT about? Probably I need new shoes, but UGH. How am I supposed to participate in Elisabeth’s walking club if I’m not walking? It feels like the only option is yoga, so I guess I will see what Adriene has to offer. It’s just that I feel impatient when I try to do yoga. Impatient and also clunky and off kilter. I am realizing that those are reasons TO do yoga, not to avoid it.
I am in the process of transitioning to a new blog – with new URL and layout and everything – and that is a HUGE pain. I realize it will also be a bit of a pain for you as well, and I apologize in advance. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out how to make this blog link automatically to the new one, once it’s all transitioned. I’m still trying to figure out how the new layout works. My free WordPress blog theme is so old that it is no longer supported, so I can’t recreate it on the new blog, which annoys me to no end. And the new blog theme doesn’t seem to work quite the same way, which is also frustrating and makes me feel very old and out of touch with technology. It’s all on WordPress, I don’t know why it doesn’t work the same way. Grump grump, crab crab.
Death has been on my mind a bit this week, so please skip this bullet if you aren’t up for THAT. I mean, we have the Passover and Easter stories, which are both as full of death as they are of hope. Also, I had a nightmare about my friend – in which I texted her old phone number because I missed her, and she responded, and then was furious at me because I hadn’t reached out to her (because I thought she was dead). In the dream, I so clearly remembered her wake, and yet I got to see her, in person, in the dream, and she was so very alive. I was so grateful that I had been wrong, and felt so guilty for having believed she was dead, and so devastated that I had her back in my life only for her to treat me with anger and coldness. When I finally woke up, I had a whole day of residual grief and guilt, on top of the renewed sense of loss that comes with having to confront that a truth you had accepted for many years is still true.
If you skipped the previous bullet, you should skip this one too. Death was with us at the Passover seder this week, too. The last time I’d been in our friends’ home, it was to honor the loss of their mother. I was grateful to see all the same faces, gathered this time in celebration instead of in mourning. But their mother’s absence was palpable. I wanted, so many times throughout the evening, to say her name, to acknowledge that she was not there. But in the concentric circles of closeness to the family, I am in one of the outer rings, and it did not feel appropriate. And yet. Isn’t one of the loneliest parts of loss the feeling that you are the only one who remembers your loved one? Wouldn’t it be a comfort to know that others are thinking of her too? The aftermath of loss is so unnecessarily complicated. I think we think that feel we are expected to move on from loss, or that we worry we will bring down the mood if we bring up a lost loved one in a celebratory space, or that we don’t want to provoke additional pain in those who are grieving by calling their loved one to mind (when, of course, our dead do not ever leave our thoughts). In the end, I did not mention her once; it never felt appropriate. And yet I wish I had had the courage to say something, even if it was the wrong thing. My current plan is to try to find the right words to say I missed her in the thank you note I will write to our host.
Let’s talk about something cheery and frivolous! After your thoughtful responses to my Easter basket conundrum, and a text from my husband that said something like “buy lots of candy and maybe one small present,” I did indeed go buy “lots of candy.” Like, waaaayyyyyyy too much candy. The small present is a book I bought on a whim. I read this book – and, in fact, much of the series – when I was a kid, so the nostalgia factor played a big part in my spur-of-the-moment purchase. I hope Carla likes it, but at the very least I will enjoy rereading it.
We are back to the dessert drawing board. I mentioned to Carla that her father had requested coconut cake or carrot cake for Easter dessert, and she said she doesn’t like either of those options. Well, neither do I. So we are trying to figure out something that sounds festive and springy and light and not terribly complicated. My vote is for this smashed raspberry cake (even though it sounds a little more complex than I was hoping for), but my husband wants to make a trifle (even though we do not have a trifle dish), and Carla wants a strawberry cake (for which I cannot find a recipe that sounds appealing).
While I was shopping for Easter candy, I wandered into the gardening aisle. Every year, I have grand plans to grow a bunch of things, despite a long history of lackluster results with getting things to grow, and this year is no exception. I bought A TON of seeds, tomato and zucchini and basil and dill and cilantro, but also a bunch of flower seeds, hollyhock and calendula and echinacea and more. I have never tried to grow flowers from seed before. We’ll see if I have any success at all. I’m still trying to revive my poor sickly palm plants. I was able to move them out to the sun porch this week, for some tropical weather. Although it is supposed to snow next week. These tumultuous weather patterns are not pleasant.
Speaking of which, Carla and I had a bit of excitement this week. We were driving home from school when my phone lit up with an emergency tornado warning alert. I thought the tornado warning was for the area around our home, so I kept driving. My husband texted that we should go to the mall or something, but that would have meant turning around, so I suggested I would drive us to his hospital and we could all wait out the tornado warning together. Well, okay, he said, but there’s a tornado warning here, too. Oh, great. I had not realized we were also driving through a tornado warning. If I have fixed any tornado knowledge in my brain, it is that being in a car during a tornado is a Bad Plan. It was at that moment that the wind picked up and rain started coming down in sheets. No one else driving around us seemed the least bit concerned – except, perhaps, for the guy on the motorcycle in front of us, who kept looking up at the sky. When lightning and thunder started out of nowhere, I turned into the nearest parking lot, grabbed Carla, and dashed into a restaurant. I was quite nervous at that point, and it was disorienting to burst into the restaurant, soaking wet, only to see staff and patrons behaving as though everything was totally normal. Carla’s school tornado drill training kicked in and she dragged me toward a table in the back of the restaurant, away from the windows and doors. While I was trying to figure out what to do – do I… order food??? – she said that we’d passed a sign for the bathrooms, which were downstairs, and she wanted us to go into the basement. Yes, good, let’s do that. There were only two other women down there. Apparently, no one seems to feel as freaked out by a tornado warning as I do???? We waited out the storm and everything was fine, but the whole experience was very weird. Tornados would occasionally swirl through my hometown in the summers, and my mother was very, very firm about always going into the basement to ride out the threat. But here, even pulling off the road seemed like an overreaction! Oh well. I would rather overreact than the alternative.
Carla, who was quite justifiably terrified by this experience, was primarily concerned for the cat. Who was at home, alone. Fortunately, we could watch him. My husband got me a pet camera for my birthday, and then he got a second one so we could check in on the cat while we were gone over spring break. (Lenny also had a cat sitter, he wasn’t alone all day every day.) So Carla was able to watch him while we were hunkered down in the restaurant basement. He spent the entire time on the kitchen table (where he is not allowed) and the kitchen island (where he is also not allowed), completely unperturbed by the thunder and lightning going on outside.

*Looking directly at the camera, as if to say, “What are YOU going to do about it?”*

That’s it for today, Internet. Happy holidays, to those who celebrate, and happy weekend to those who don’t.

July 2, 2025 by suzanne day by day

Supporting Friends in Times of Loss

The prevailing advice for friends who want to support others in times of loss (or new baby, or after surgery, or during other tumultuous life events) is that you should offer something specific, rather than saying something generic like, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

In fact, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” seems frequently vilified as actively non-helpful. And I get that. I certainly don’t want to ask my friend who is grieving/recovering/etc. to take on the additional work of assigning me a job to do. It’s just that sometimes, a person really DOES want to help, and yet doesn’t have the full picture of what “help” might look like.

When dear family friends of ours lost their mother, I tried to do the specificity thing. I said, “I am happy to come do laundry, drive kids to appointments or activities, pick up groceries, make meals – whatever you need.” Okay, I suppose that is still a little broad.

I did check in with my friends every day for several weeks, and am trying to continue to purposefully reach out because I know they are still grieving. That feels doable but also like not enough.

Another close friend – K – recently lost a family member – a person I’ve never met. She asked if I could sit at the house for a few hours to accept food and flowers. I did not know this was a role people needed to fill, but I am so glad she reached out and I’m so glad I am able to do something to help.

K noted that she felt lucky to have a friend she could ask to take on this task. That sounds self-aggrandizing, but I’m not trying to toot my own miniature horn here – her point was that it feels important to have people in your life that you can count on for that kind of thing, that you know you could ask to do your laundry or buy you groceries or sit in your house and accept food and flowers. She said this experience of dealing with death has sharpened her sense of urgency around cultivating close connections with people.

I take her point. If I contemplate a situation where I needed someone to drive me to chemotherapy every week or couldn’t get out of bed and required someone to do laundry or drive Carla to and from school or any of the ten thousand mundane things necessary even during times of crisis, I do think I have a few people I could call on, without embarrassment, without feeling as though I were overstepping the boundaries of our relationships. Do you have people like that? It’s a small group, for sure, but I’m grateful it exists. (Unfortunately, two of these members of my support system live several states away which makes it much more difficult. When they’ve lost loved ones, it has been so hard to know what to do and how to support them from afar. In one case, I was able to fly to my friend’s house for the funeral; in another case, I was not able to leave Carla and it wouldn’t have been feasible/appropriate to take her.)

The thing is, when I think about DOING supportive things for other people, the circle enlarges quite a bit. The neighbors in our old neighborhood, who were so kind to Carla when we lived there, and with whom I still exchange texts and holiday cards, and occasional visits: I would be happy to do any of those things and more for any of them. My neighbors here, whom I know less well, but with whom I feel like relationships are blossoming? Same. Any of the women I volunteer with. Any of the other parents of Carla’s classmates. Any of my blog friends. (Although again, there’s the distance issue at play with many of us.) A person in my outer circle had surgery a few years ago, and called me crying because she wasn’t able to lift her mattress enough to make her bed, so I went over and made her bed for her. It was such a small thing, but it took only a few minutes out of my day, and it helped her, and it felt so good to be useful.

Because I know that I am a perfectly ordinary person, I am going to assume that most of us feel that way. That if help were needed, and we were available, we would step in. That’s comforting, and I hope when I do need help, I remember that.

I also hope I remember that “please let me know if there’s anything I can do” comes from a genuine desire to do something, anything in support. That it isn’t a meaningless platitude, but a sincere wish to know what I need.

That said, it would sure be nice to have a manual of all the things that are DEFINITELY NEEDED during times of life upheaval or crisis or transition. I’d even settle for a list of what to do in times of bereavement, because all of us will encounter loss both at home and in our communities.

My first instinct is always to make food. When a neighbor’s spouse died several years ago, I made a big pot of stew and a batch of cookies, packaged it all up with some disposable napkins, plates, and cutlery, and walked it down to her house. That felt like Doing Something. I hoped that even if she couldn’t eat the stew/cookies for whatever reason, she could share it with visitors, or at the very very least would take it as a token of my sympathy.

But food is just one thing that’s universally needed! There have to be others, right? If there is a need for someone to sit at a house and accept food and flowers, there are certainly other roles that need filling. Collecting flowers and food from the funeral home after a wake? Making a post-funeral meal for people to come home to? Taking all the funeral clothing to the dry cleaner? Caring for pets? Watering plants? Running the vacuum around the house and cleaning the bathrooms? I don’t even know.

If you have lost someone (and if so, my heart is with you), what did you find most helpful from those around you? Or what did you most need during that time? If you’ve been the helper, what have you done to offer support?

Part of MY problem is that I get too much in my own head about stuff. I feel a little reluctant to say, “I will do X” when I don’t know if X is needed, or if X is something my friend might prefer to do herself (making her own dinner might feel like an injection of normalcy; she might think giving me her laundry is too intimate a task), or if X infringes on her privacy or personal space (I’m happy to pick up groceries, but maybe she doesn’t want me poking around in her fridge or pantry to put things away).

People are so gracious and so unwilling to inconvenience others, but I think most of us want to HELP, and don’t see helping as an inconvenience. If only we knew what to DO.

I’m not sure how to end this post or if it even makes sense (I was up until three last night and that is the third night in the past five days that I’ve been involuntarily awake in the three o’clock hour, so let’s blame any issues on this post on THAT), but I would be interested in your thoughts.

September 25, 2020 by suzanne day by day

Never Have I Ever

For a few weeks or months maybe, I have noticed a change in my grief. I still think of my friend every day, but the thoughts are mainly happy and wistful. There is the occasional instance when I come across something I would have normally called or texted her about, and I can’t call or text her, and so there’s nowhere for that desire to go, which is a sad and unbalancing way to feel. But mainly I’ve been doing better. Less sharp stabbing pain, more dull, bearable ache. But I have been having jolts of anticipatory sadness in the past week or so, knowing that the milestone of One Year Since She Left Us was coming up. And today I am really not okay. I suppose this is all normal, and you’ve possibly endured it too, and I’m sorry.

I dreamt about her last night. It was one of those dreams that feels long and endless, but of course it probably took only a few seconds. In the dream, my friend was alive and cheerful and planning all sorts of fun things to do, but I knew she was going to die before we got to do any of it. So instead of being able to enjoy the planning and the anticipation, all I could do was struggle not to cry, to try very very hard to preserve the illusion – for her – that everything was and would continue to be great. It was an awful, heartbreaking dream — not least because I was with! her! and yet I was ruining that precious time by being sad!

But of course this is how it is for all of us. We are all going to leave this plane of existence at one time or another. We will, and so will everyone we love. And we know that it will happen. And yet somehow we go on, making plans, and falling in love, and having babies, and getting crabby with one another and making poor decisions and wasting time and sleeping in and procrastinating and all the mundane, wonderful activities of a normal life, and pretending for our loved ones and ourselves that everything is fine without falling over sobbing from the absurdity of all of it. I do not know how.

::EXTREME TONE CHANGE::

Which is all to say that I am craving uplift and distraction. I think I will watch some old episodes of Real Housewivesbecause that is soothing in its ridiculousness. Maybe I will take a nap. Sunshine and exercise are curative, or, if not exactly curative, at least healthful so I plan on walking to the neighborhood grocery store to check out the selection of mums, which I drive past every day and which seem lovely and cheerful and fall-ish. Perhaps, if the store looks un-crowded, I will even dash in and buy an avocado.

What else can I do to distract myself? If you’re up for it, we could play a little game of Never Have I Ever.

Come on, it’s Friday, everything is awful. I’ll go first.

Never Have I Ever…

… gone more than a day without shaving my legs. And even that is RARE. A friend noticed the cooling weather with relish the other day, saying she was excited to stop painting her toes and shaving her legs. Do most people do that? Go all winter without shaving? It sounds very freeing, but itchy. I have been shaving my legs since sixth grade, if I remember right (I certainly remember being teased by other, more sophisticated girls for how hairy my legs were) (to be fair, they were very lush), and I haven’t stopped since. Once in a while, if I don’t take a shower that day, I won’t shave. But every single time I bathe, I shave my legs. Even if I went swimming at a spa or something, back in the Before Times, I would shave my legs afterward, with those horrible single-blade disposable razors you get at places like that. Even if I forget my razor at a hotel, I call down and get a free one so I can shave. Even when I was pregnant, I shaved my legs EVERY DAY. It’s just MUCH more comfortable to me, to have clean-shaven stems. I do not feel the same compulsion with my underarms.

…eaten sushi. At least the raw fish kind. Listen, there are just some foods I KNOW I won’t like. Yes, yes, I know you are supposed to try new things ‘cuz they might taste good (^TM Daniel Tiger), but I can TELL by the way the raw fish looks that it is going to be a texture I cannot abide. Plus, I have touched a lot of raw fish, so I KNOW it will be a texture I cannot abide. It is beautiful and many many people love it but it is NOT for me.

…lived by myself. I went straight from my parents’ house to college, where I shared a dorm all four years (three of those years, my roommate was the friend I am missing today). Then I went to graduate school and lived with my then-boyfriend. Then he and I moved together so he could attend medical school, then we got married, and have been living together ever since. I think the closest I ever came to living alone was the summer before senior year of college when I got a job in my husband’s hometown so we could be together… and “house sat” for a family who lived across the street from his childhood home. I slept on a mattress on the floor in one of the bedrooms and had to keep the house Show Ready for any interested buyers. There was zero furniture in the house, and it was enormous and had a scary basement. But that was three months AT MOST and I spent much of my non-working time at my husband’s house.

…broken a bone. Well, caveat, I do think I may have broken a big toe at some point in my youth. But that was never proven and therefore doesn’t count. My husband has broken a couple of bones and it seems like I’m in the minority when it comes to leaving my thirties with all my original bones, intact. Maybe I just run in a fragile crowd, I don’t know.

…seen my husband’s office. Okay, okay, this is kind of a cheat because he has three offices. (Down from five.) But I have only seen one of the current offices. That’s kind of weird to me, considering how much time I spent in my father’s medical office – and even in my mom’s law office – when I was a kid. I feel like I should be able to picture where he is when he’s at work. Not in a controlling way. I suppose the difference is that it’s not really HIS space; he shares it, since he rotates through, so he has no copies of his medical license and diplomas on the wall, no nameplate on his desk, no framed photos of me and Carla on bookshelves filled with not his books, no trout-themed paintings on all the exam room walls (^TM my former ophthalmologist). But STILL! He goes to these places every week and it feels odd to me that I have yet to see them.

Okay. Your turn.