ACCORDING TO ZAC

The loss of a parent in a person's life is going to be pretty profound. Even if that person didn't have a strong connection with his or her parent, a mom/dad gives you half of who you are by genes alone. You can't escape that—they helped make you! It's even harder if you loved that parent and were close. I've been thinking about my mom a lot over the last few months, and it's been surprisingly tumultuous. The first six or eight months after she died, I would have a few good days and then be struck suddenly with grief and sadness. And yes, I obviously missed her always , and still do, but the shock and hurt would come and go. It would hit me in random moments and with surprising intensity while I made sense of the fact that she's really gone, not just on a trip or something. Those feelings of intense sadness had mostly faded, and nostalgia and slight longing are what persisted. It was a dull ache that was definitely livable. The last few months, however...

Cheryl Strayed  is a writer and generally interesting human being from what I've been able to glean from the little I know about her. She wrote a memoir called Wild  that was then adapted into a major motion picture starring everybody's sweetheart, Reese Witherspoon. Though I haven't read her memoir, I have read synopses of her memoir (and accompanying film). She has led an interesting life, full of passion, struggle, despair and joy, among many other things. One thing she has had to deal with is losing her mother. Cheryl was in her 20s, if I remember correctly, and her mother was only 45. It was a crushing blow to her. Now, many years later, she has compiled a series of her most insightful tidbits about life when she was working as an anonymous advice columnist named Sugar. My lovely friend Kristina sent me this book in the weeks after my mother's death in November 2014, hoping that it would help me find ways of coping with my recent tragedy and be able to move for...

(Context: my wonderful mother passed away in early November 2014 from cancer. The diagnosis a year previously had been shocking, but her decline was not. That has been one of many sources of great emotion over the last year. This entry will be about coping with the loss of her, but it could very well be applied to the setbacks we face in life, whether self-inflicted or otherwise.) Life is such a crazy thing. The range of emotions I have felt in the last year or so would take days to explain completely, and the emotions I've felt in the last few days alone have had me up and down. Fortunately enough, I started going through old journal entries this afternoon and I found one that was really encouraging. Last March I had just finished reading a silly book called Allegiant . There were a lot of things I didn't like about the book, but if there was anything redeeming at all about the hundreds of pages I read it was the core message delivered at the very end: "We can be...