So excited to see the photo of my kids on the cover of this lovely print magazine. Essay tells the story of my son as a new dad and his endeavor to get his wife to the hospital in what might have been an emergency. I am so proud of him as a parent!
“One Wedding and a Funeral” is an essay, representing a chapter of my upcoming memoir, about being the mother of Seattle cop during the days of the Defund Movement. It sadly tells the story of one young police officer who lost her life serving her community during this time (in a separate incident) and what that means to me as a cop mom.
Marion, Indiana is a struggling rust belt town up SR 69 from Indianapolis. The Mississinewa River is the prettiest geographic feature of the city, and Matter Park stretches for green miles along it. Marion was my home for seventeen years. Most days, I walked along the river, looking for blue herons standing on one leg in the shallows. Then I crossed over a little hill in the park to visit a memorial to the young soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wandered along the curved pathway and said a silent prayer for each of the dead boys represented by the eight plaques that line its bricked sidewalk.
The pain of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has colored the lives of most Jewish people since that date. And yet, our family experienced the most blessed joy of all in the birth of our first grandchild. This essay tries to combine these two aspects of our lives.