Posts about loss and illness

Anonymous 2026/09/24 My brother and I divided our mother's ashes in 2018 and we have not spoken since the funeral home parking lot. We're fifty-four and fifty-one. One sister, who lives in Oregon and who will not take a side, which is the correct decision and which I resent. How t…

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Anonymous 2026/10/12 My daughter's goldfish lived nine years and I replaced it four times and she found out last month, at twenty-four, and her reaction is not what I expected. The fish was from my father. He gave it to her in 2007, when she was six — a bowl, a plastic plant, one …

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Anonymous 2026/10/14 Practical question and please don't tell me to "check with Social Security" — I have, three times. My father died in 2022 and I'm trying to find out whether he had a pension from a company that was sold three times. All the details, because I've learned the va…

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Anonymous 2026/10/05 My sister went to prison in 2019 and my wife and I took her two kids, and six years later I want to write the part that isn't inspiring. The kids were four and seven. They're ten and thirteen now. We had one of our own, who was six. My sister got sixty-two mon…

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Anonymous 2026/10/01 I found out at fifty-one that neither of my kids is biologically mine, and I've decided not to tell them, and I need to explain the reasoning to someone. Married twenty-four years. Two kids, twenty-two and nineteen. I found out in the stupidest possible way: a…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I’m the executor of my uncle’s estate and I found a letter he clearly never intended the family to see. He died unexpectedly and left me in charge because I’m “the organized one.” While going through documents, I found a sealed envelope with no legal instructi…

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Anonymous 2026/10/08 A practical question, because I've been circling it for a year and the internet is full of people who have never had to do it. How do you tell your adult kids you're selling the house they grew up in? My wife died in 2023. The house is a four-bedroom in a town…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I've been a pastor for nineteen years and I stopped believing somewhere around year fourteen. I'm going to be precise, because "lost my faith" is a phrase that covers too much and I've hidden inside it. I don't think there's nobody there. I'm not an atheist — …

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Anonymous 2026/09/27 Does anybody else feel absolutely nothing when a coworker tells you their parent died? I'm not a cold person in other ways. I cry at commercials. I've cried at my dog's vet appointments. But someone at work loses their mother and I hear myself say the correct …

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Anonymous 2026/09/24 I never told my father I forgave him. He died thinking I was still angry. I was not angry for years before that, I just did not know how to start the sentence, and I kept telling myself there was time. There was not.

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Anonymous 2026/09/24 I have not driven on a highway in four years and I have built an entire life around hiding it. The accident wasn't even that bad. Nobody died. I got rear-ended at about sixty-five and spun across two lanes and ended up facing traffic on the shoulder, and for m…

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Anonymous 2026/10/12 Practical question, and please don't tell me to "negotiate with the hospital" — I've called nine times. I got a nineteen-thousand-dollar bill from an air ambulance and I need to know the actual sequence. Here's the situation, as specifically as I can. In June …

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Anonymous 2026/10/05 In 2014 I pulled out of a side street and caused an accident, nobody was seriously hurt, and it reorganized how I move through the world in a way I've never been able to explain to anybody. I'm fifty. The accident was a Tuesday, about four fifteen in the after…

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Anonymous 2026/10/05 In 2009 I told a detective my cousin was at my apartment on a night he wasn't, and a family in my town has never found out who hit their son. I was twenty-four. My cousin was twenty-two. We'd grown up four houses apart and he was closer to me than my actual br…

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