2024: Small Joys & Practical Magic

Plus, my thoughts on grief, a medical emergency, and how it changed my perspective

So many joyful moments this year: The northern lights! The dahlias! My son’s photographs! My garden!

I've reached an age where I'm always grateful for another year of life, even the hard years, even the sick years, even the years that feel like a slog. But even as I embrace this gratitude, I've also come to understand the complex ways in which it intertwines with another constant companion: grief. What no one tells you about grief is that it accumulates as we soldier through the chaos and joy of life. I've found, in the aftermath of the deaths of family and dear friends, that a certain kind of grief remains close to the surface. It bothered me when I first noticed the sort of nagging sense of something being wrong. Over time, however, I started to accept these feelings of grief; I still have such deep sadness when I think of the dead, who I'd love to talk to about politics or how we cooked that one recipe and just laugh about life one more time. While I will never look for silver linings in loss, I've come to see grief as a possible guide - to the shape of our love, to the impermanence of life, to the root of what makes us human. Grief can serve as a reminder of our luck at still being here, at this moment, filling us with gratitude at what remains. 

This heightened awareness of the importance of gratitude took on a new, profoundly personal dimension this year when I faced my own health crisis. In February 2024, I was hospitalized with sepsis - caused by a gallstone stuck in my bile duct. I had never been sick like that before. Because my own mother had spent much of my childhood ill and in hospitals, that first afternoon in the Emergency Room, before we really understood what was wrong, I made Tim go home to our children - to spare them the memories I had of hospitals and ill mothers. So I did the really, really hard part of being sick alone - from the ambulance ride at 11pm across country roads to a regional hospital equipped to handle my increasingly dangerous blood infection, to navigating being admitted at midnight, to advocating for myself (I have a blood clotting disorder that makes surgery and prolonged bed rest dangerous).

I’ve never been good at trusting other people or myself. An anxiety disorder, some formative experiences with untrustworthy people, and an active imagination all contributed to a pervasive holding of people at arm’s length. Years of therapy have made me aware of this facet of my emotional topography in technicolor detail. So maybe you can imagine my overwhelming sense of vulnerability and automatic distrust as I was loaded into a sprinter van driven by two male EMTs in the cold, inky darkness of a February night.

But here is the first gift I received that night: the EMTs, Matt and Jeff, had been working together for nearly 20 years, and this was far from their first time driving a woman alone in the night. Within minutes of starting the race to get me safely transferred to Poughkeepsie, they referenced their wives - a very gentle and easy way to put me at ease. They were kind and polite, and Matt, a writer himself, talked to me for the entire hour about writing (a true gift!). 

The nurses and doctors at Vassar Brothers were heroic, from a nurse who held my hand while I cried over a miscommunication and later sent a patient advocate to my room to the experienced surgeon who, when he couldn't get the stone out of my narrow bile duct, let go of his ego and simply put in a stent to let my liver start to do its job. 

Due to the need for multiple procedures under anesthesia, I wasn't allowed to eat anything for what ended up being five days - 'nothing by mouth' as the words on my dining form said. The hospital kept me hydrated with IVs, but, as I said to my therapist afterward, after the final surgery, after the hard reset of a five day forced fast - the world felt brand new. I was so unbelievably grateful to be alive; to eat a banana felt like a taste of the divine; to drink a round plastic cup of cranberry juice; to walk slowly around the hospital ward with my IV pole made me deliriously happy. 

I guess the harvest of the whole scary thing - the three procedures to remove the stone and, eventually, my gallbladder, the isolation of being alone for 6 days without food, so far away from my children and my husband, was that I did it. I learned in 2024 that I could trust myself when the chips were really down. I also learned that I can trust my community. I was humbled by my husband's love and care. I still feel humbled with gratitude at the friends who took our children so that Tim could be with me for a few hours, the friends who dropped off food and wine and cookies, the friends who responded to my txts in the middle of the night, the friends who sent shearling Birkenstock sandals to the hospital, and the friend who dropped off an enormous shearling covered hot water bottle to help with the 'trapped gas' after surgery. Yet another friend sent an electric blanket and compression socks and texted me every morning for months afterward. I was humbled to realize I hadn't really known how to care for other people until I was receiving these thoughtful, loving gestures.

Once home, my recovery was much longer than I expected; my body was down an organ and having to adapt (which still fills me with awe that the body can make this kind of adjustment). I was forced to rest and be much slower than I had ever had to be before. It was five months before I felt close to my old energy levels. In that slow time, I took so much pleasure in being alive; the mundane was suddenly miraculous. Just watching my children, just listening to my husband laugh, watching the garden emerge in the spring and mature into a truly spectacular summer garden. I'd been working on the garden for years, and to see it all come together in a time when I was healing, and everything felt impossibly slow and uncertain was fundamentally steadying. 

In 2024, I rediscovered the importance of finding joy and beauty in the ordinary, of celebrating the little things. In that spirit, here are some of the small pleasures and practical objects that brought me happiness and comfort.

2024: Small Joys

This was a year where, more than ever, I appreciated the small gesture, the small joy, the satisfaction of a lovely detail in an otherwise hard day.

A. This is a lovely lipstick - natural feeling, natural-looking, unscented and unflavored.

B. This ribbon makes me happy whenever I use it.

C. The happiest cards.

D. I wore these charm necklaces non-stop this year.

E. A happy umbrella for the inevitable rainy days.

2024: Practical Magic

This was a year where I reveled in practical magic almost as much as a small joy.

A. These are the best breath mints, sold in a six-pack, so you can keep a tin in every bag and every car.

B. The real MVP of 2024 was this dressing, Garlic Expressions, which I now buy in bulk. It's a solid salad dressing and excellent as a marinade for chicken or kebabs.

C. These Prepared Hero fire blankets were a sleeper hit at Christmas.

D. The runner-up MVP would be this cleaning solution for dog urine.

E. I first used these laundry detergent sheets in an Airbnb, and we've used them for over a year. And we're a family that gets oily stains on everything. I recommend them 10/10.

F. Our mornings have been much smoother since I bought this shower clock. No more time slippage for this ADHD mom!

G. This is the funniest item on my list but truly the most satisfying. We had three - count them - three - flat tires due to nails. I bought this HUGE magnet and trawled our driveway. It was extremely satisfying to hear the plink plink plink of nails and screws and random metal hitting it. The best part is that there have been no flat tires since!! I'll take all the small victories I can.

2024 showed me the depth of my resilience and the strength of the love that surrounds me. I found reminders of beauty and grace even in the darkest of times. Looking ahead to 2025, I will embrace gratitude as a revolutionary act, a defiant insistence on finding light in the darkness. And I will continue to seek out and celebrate the small joys and everyday magic with you.