I pulled up to my house with a sigh of relief. It had been another tough day at school.
I teach high school English. I love reading and writing and language and literature, but lately I had been going through the motions. A stack of papers awaited my grading pen on the car seat beside me. Just the thought of tackling those papers was exhausting.
Eight months earlier, my 27-year-old son, Russell, had died unexpectedly. His car had caught fire. The details were too awful to contemplate. The tragedy was so horrific, it had blotted out my whole world.
I was back at work now, but my job was the only thing that had stayed the same in my life. I was a shell of my former self. Listless. Swallowed by despair. I barely got out of bed each day.
I was seeing a psychiatrist, which helped a little, but I was still floundering. My husband, John, and my daughter, Allison, who was in high school, struggled too. People
