Kristen

Kristen’s five words are Outgoing, sarcastic, witty, bold, and caring. She is in her forties, an empty nester … and a widow. Her husband died of cancer not long before the diary, soon after he fell ill. She lives with her dog on a small fixed income, takes on a little work to make ends meet, and plans to finish a degree paused by grief and the pandemic. A self-described natural pessimist, she does one kind thing for someone every day, because cheerfulness can be just as contagious as any virus.

Her timeline is one of the longest in the study, a line of many events. It begins with a trauma in her early teens, and from it she traces years of drinking and drugs, leaving school, early marriages, and leaving violence with her children. Becoming a mother as a teenager was her first turning point: Becoming a mother helped save my life because it made me grow up and stop the dangerous things I was doing. In her twenties, addiction took hold, and for a time she came close to losing her life, her home and her children. In her thirties she and the man who became her last husband began treatment together: together we were strong enough to quit drugs when neither of us were strong enough to quit on our own. She explains the daily discipline of recovery and its stakes: it can be the difference literally between life and death.

Then the line turns. A first apartment, her daughter home again, a home of her own; and, after the deaths of a beloved grandmother and of her husband, the repair of her bonds with her mother and her daughter. Asked for words before and after, she wrote Contentious, hurtful, resentful and then Open, honest, resolution, stable, trusting, loving. Her line ends not in loss but in open question marks. One reading is that she chose to end on openness.

Her food world is warm in memory and thin now. Her mother, and a grandmother who grew up in the Depression, taught her a plate of protein and two vegetables, fried okra, and the joy of licking the beaters. Her grandmother could take an empty pantry and manage to make a meal. Today Kristen lives with diabetes and with mental health conditions she manages with medication; she has cut back hard on sugar and is working on soda. Her plate is cereal, a frozen steamer bowl, pudding, yogurt. She tends, in her word, to get stuck on certain foods.

Her Day 5 change is a tender one: I don’t normally bother cooking a legit meal any more. It just seems like too much of a hassle to cook a complete meal for just one person. She loves to cook for the people she loves, so I would need to convince myself that I am worth cooking for. DeVault (1991) showed how feeding others is a form of care; Kristen’s entries suggest what happens when the person she cooked for is gone.

Her weakness is pulling away from help, not wanting to admit yet another problem in her life. After her husband’s death, My dog made sure I got out of bed every day. Her 2 a.m. person is her daughter, close again after years apart: She is my superhero and I often tell her so. Her letter: You are always cheering everybody else on, so never hesitate to bask in someone else’s praise for you.