Andy Laats

Somebody's got to book the bounce house for the birthday party.

Clinical trial research.

For about four years, it felt like we had the upper hand.

But then a bad scan.

I quit my job to help, which was not a hard decision.

Recurrent metastasized ovarian cancer has a very, very, very low survival rate.

But we fully believed that if we tried hard enough, we could be the outlier.

And we weren't.

Liz died just over nine years ago.

Margo was 12, Gwen was 10, and Drew was eight.

At this point, my business card would have said, single parent.

Before Liz died, I thought of all the things that parents did as a complete alphabet, A to Z. And the way it worked in our family was I did A through M, kind of the blunt stuff.

The job, paycheck, the tire pressure in the minivan.

Liz did N through Z, more nuanced, making sure the kids, the dog and me were looked after and happy.

After she died, I figured my job would simply be the sum of the two, you know, the full A to Z. Well, first of all, I completely underestimated how hard Liz's end of the alphabet was, that N through Z. I mean, six days after she died, all three kids got sent home from school with headlights.

We'd been sleeping in the same room together, so it was a total mess.

Things got more routine, but they didn't get easier.

Three kids, two schools, five after-school activities, just getting everybody to where they needed to be.

Permission slip, sunscreen, water bottle, both shoes.

I don't know how people did it.