As long as there weren’t any traffic snags, I knew I could drop the kids off at school and still make it to the McDonald’s restroom down the street in the nick of time, without crapping my pants. From there I could make it back home. I had figured out where every public restroom in town was located. I knew which ones were multiple stalls versus single stalls, and which ones required a key or code to access. I’d learned that if I had to ask for a key or wait for someone else to finish up in a one-stall facility — I was definitely going to poop my pants. For three months, I’d been plagued with fecal incontinence, and not the kind where you poop just a little.
It was explosive diarrhea, a lot of it, the blow-out-your-pants and run-down-your-legs kind of emergency, and I couldn’t make it stop. Doctors had tested me for everything imaginable, finally tossing their hands up with a diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. They didn’t know why. I didn’t know why. No one knew why. No matter what I did, what I ate or didn’t eat, how I slept, or what medications and treatments I tried, no amount of testing or knowledgeable doctor could figure out why I had two or three, unexpected, sudden, explosive bouts of diarrhea, every single day.
Then one day, while JD and I were in the car running errands logistically scheduled around public restrooms, I silently prayed for God to please just make it stop.
And just like that, I felt this wave of calm come over my entire body, like something holy had passed over and through me, and I stopped pooping my pants.
Well, I stopped doing it regularly. I still manage to crap myself like once a year, but usually that’s because I’m genuinely sick or I ate something bad. It’s amazing how you eat when you’re a single woman and an empty nester. Sniff test, shrug, 60 seconds in the microwave — oughta do.
I never ate like that when I was married. But here and now as a widow in 2026 whose kids have launched, I barely cook, and it lands me in poopville about once a year because I’ve eaten something that has expired in my own fridge. Anyway, back to the story. That day when I prayed, the consistent pants shitting stopped. I think that was a miracle.
And if you feel like I’m mocking the miracles of God, I’ll tell ya what. Go shit your pants multiple times a day, every day, for three months, and listen to doctors say “This is just something you’re going to have to manage.”
Go buy adult diapers at the age of 30. Start being absolutely okay with having to poop in public (on walking trails, the side of the road, a men’s bathroom because the women’s was full, a plastic grocery bag you found in your car). Start regularly carrying wipes and an extra change of clothes in your purse. Lose 30 pounds because you’re afraid to eat. Quit your job because you’re too ashamed to say, I can’t control my poop.
Then finally pray, and when it’s healed in that moment, immediately — you’ll know. You’ll believe. That shit was a miracle.
At Wednesday night church, my pastor talked about the spiritual gifts of miracles and healing. Miracles happen immediately, he said, and I remembered my prayer and the instant healing I received over my bowels in 2008. I giggled a little, too. Hell of a miracle.
The gift of healing, however. That one is different. It takes time. God is currently healing a strained relationship between my oldest daughter and me. He’s healing my own childhood wounds, abuse I endured silently for years. And he’s healing my grief, the gaping loss of my best friend, lover, husband, and father of my children, but it’s taking a lot of time.
Healing takes time.
It takes time to experience joy after losing your spouse. It takes time before you’re able to focus at work again. Or maintain a regular hygiene schedule. Or even see another married couple in the grocery store without completely unraveling. It takes time to figure out who you are in a world where the love of your life no longer resides. It takes time to attend church by yourself, without crying. It takes time to raise your hands and praise God during the worship songs. It takes time to be able to say, “He passed,” without falling apart.
It also takes time to acknowledge the entire, whole, flawed, person you lost — instead of just the romanticized, perfect version of him you entombed when he died, because how could you possibly say anything negative about a dead man that was your everything. He was my hero. My protector. My knight in shining armor. The alpha of our pack.
It has taken a lot of time for me to say, This was a man who wasn’t perfect, but in all his imperfectness, he was whole and good and amazing and cherished not only for his strengths, but for his weaknesses and failures, too. He was admired for all the things he survived, for all his quirks, even the annoying ones, and for his commitment to family. I miss all of him. His curiosity, his intelligence, his ignorance, his sense of humor, his anger when he felt vulnerable, his ability to see the good in tough circumstances — and his inability to face his deepest hurts.
I miss his creativity, his habit of starting 20 projects all at once and only finishing them 90% of the way. (We called him the 90% guy, jokingly.) I miss his storytelling, especially his family stories about growing up in the New Jersey Pinelands and torturing his sister. I miss his belief in us, The Wolfes, more affectionately known as the Wolfepack — his insistence that we never turn our backs on a pack member.
I miss his priority for keeping the family strong in love and understanding and trust. “Trust,” he used to say when one of us was refusing to take his hand. And that word, when he said it like that, so soft, so genuine, so pure with his outstretched hand. It meant everything. It was the biggest promise a husband, a father, a humble and imperfect man could ever make. I wish he were here to help mend the relationship between me and my oldest daughter, to outstretch his hand and look into both our eyes and say, Trust.
I am not giving up. I believe God is continuing to heal everything in my life that needs healing. I believe that His healing restores even the relationships that feel severed. I love my entire family, with my whole being. All of my children, all of my grandchildren. This amazing pack of flawed humans doing their best. I love you all with all of my being.
I choose to see the silence, the refusal to respond, the ache in my heart for not only my oldest daughter but my four beautiful grandchildren. I choose to see the time this is taking — not as evidence of God’s absence, or punishment, or reasonings justifying forsakenness. That is not how God moves. That much I know.
I choose to see it as proof that God is working. He is healing.
He is healing our family inside the mess of grief. Not only grief over a husband and father lost, but the grief and weight of the realization that we are all imperfect humans, whether mother, father, daughter, or son. We are all just doing our absolute best to love and protect and provide and participate in the beautiful humility of this thing called family.
Grief is a healing thing.
I love you Ashley Eason. I love you to the moon and back. I always have. I always will. I will never be perfect at it. None of us are, but I will always love you with all of my being.
Love, Mom
