Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

Tim: A Memoir About Healing Grief and Loss — and Hope

Debbie Lynn Miller

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by Debbie L. Miller

I met Tim in class at an improvisational acting retreat in the l ate 1990s. was a stocky guy, with a rubber-mask face that could only be described as Howdy Doody-like, and Bassett Hound eyes that made him look a little sad. A few days into the workshop, a classmate had confided in me that while Tim seemed nice, she just couldn’t “get past that clown face.”

I didn’t think any more about it, though, as I reflected on what had brought me to this old Catskills resort. A few years earlier, my two beloved eighteen-year-old cats — my children — had died, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my father died of Alzheimer’s. Soon after that, my mother died, I found a suspicious lump that required surgery, and my husband of 23 years moved out.

I was 46 and life was kicking my sorry ass.

Without a role — no longer a wife, a daughter, not even a “mother to cats” — I was firmly entrenched in a cycle of peri-menopausal grief, trying to adapt to living alone and being an orphan.

Looking for an escape from my pain and some answers, I’d signed up for a week-long improvisational acting camp held at an Upstate New York resort well beyond its glory days. (Think Kellerman’s from Dirty Dancing.)

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Debbie Lynn Miller
Debbie Lynn Miller

Written by Debbie Lynn Miller

Brooklyn satire writer Debbie L. Miller is published in The Belladonna Comedy, Frazzled, The Haven, The StopGap, Greener Pastures, and The Syndrome Magazine.

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