Hi there!
This is Steve and Franca. Welcome to our newsletter about surrendering your heart to longing, forging meaningful purpose and finding your place in the world.
A Birthday Wish
Steve suggested that I write Lia’s birthday entry for Without Envy. I am nervous, as I don’t usually share my writings with anyone. But, as Steve has told me, sharing your writing is what helps you heal. So here is my earnest attempt. The other day, Lia was
At A Glance
Back now to the daily opus of attention paid Lia’s diabetes. Her wellness of course is always on our minds and as such our strategy in treating the disease is simple: be open to anything that will multiply our opportunities to know it, treat it, and deal with it
In Any Kind of Weather
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand … Simplify, simplify — Henry David Thoreau But where do you begin? What does more, not less, community look like? Who do you turn to in shaping alliances that will make for
Revelation
From the day I had launched Without Envy I had read and written enough of my own to find appealing the degree of anonymity other authors had chosen to pursue in terms of their privacy. They were writers of great masterpieces — To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye,
Walk to Cure
Lia’s Walk to Cure Video https://youtu.be/-RKnrevaERs
When We Grow Up
Once, last week, on a day I had work that would take me away from the house, I drove Lia to the school where Franca teaches so that she could stay with her mother. It was summer vacation still and Lia was happy to be going to the school because
Noodling
In some parts they call it catting. In others, it’s hogging or stumping or dogging. If it is trout, not catfish, you are after, it is considered art, not a sport, and known to practitioners as tickling. However, those of, shall we say, a bit more extreme-minded personality, prefer
Your Brain on Diabetes
Other than early on when we had this beast by the tail and no idea what we were doing, there have been only a handful of occasions where we were truly and very stressed for Lia’s immediate safety. Not that there’s not enough room for that kind of
Where Are We Now
When it was through multiple daily injections instead of a pump that we delivered insulin to Lia, minus the early emotional strain, it was a fairly straightforward method of managing her diabetes. Or as straightforward as any such nearly impossible task can be. Three times a day she ate a
Our Little House
As long as I am talking about parenting, it would be shoddy of me not to cast a little more light on the tenets of what fatherhood means to me, especially at this time of year. Of course tenets is too strong a word for any manner of parenting, which
Family Affair
For another account of the effect diabetes has had on our family since Lia’s diagnosis I’ll turn to one of our two other children. Though I am not always a very good practitioner of this, if you can be successful in getting them to open up honestly or
Double Blind
Word of his death came to me in the middle of the night as I was making my lone way back to where he had lived. I had been far away visiting other family when his heart condition worsened to the point that I felt that was where I needed