Month: June 2026

The E-Harmony Experiment

She did it. I was surprised, not surprised, and am still amused.I got an email from Emery shortly before my 60th birthday that began with:

Don’t get mad, but…

Any communication that begins that way puts me on alert, especially when it’s from my children. Emery was living in Ft Collins, Colorado, newly married, and I was living in Kansas City. The email continued…


You’re going to be getting an email from a guy named Mike, and he’s going to ask you out on a date. Please give him a chance. He seems like a really nice guy.


I immediately picked up the phone and called her. “A guy named Mike, whom I’ve never heard of, is going to ask me out on a date? How is that going to happen, Emery?”
There was a notable pause on the phone.
“Well, I kind of signed you up for E-Harmony.”
“What do you mean, kind of? How did you kind of sign me up for a dating website?”
“Well…(another long pause), I pretended I was you.”
“You pretended you were me?” “Yeah, I did. And I wrote your profile and used some great pictures of you. My favorite ones.” You wrote my profile?”
“I did! And Mom, you would have totally approved of what I wrote. It was really good.”


She went on to explain the details. She had signed me up a few weeks earlier, and E-Harmony had selected a man named Mike as a match for me. Mike agreed. Emery, acting on my behalf, had been emailing him. Evidently, there was a spark between us in our email conversations. My reactions were conflicted. I was touched that Emery had gone to the trouble and expense in hopes of finding me a partner. Then I felt sad; sad that she had gone to the trouble and expense in hopes of finding me a partner.


A few days later, before Mike could reach out to the real Laurie, Emery texted me and said, “No need to worry about Mike. He won’t be reaching out.” And again, I picked up the phone to find out why my potential love interest was no longer interested. Had “I” said something to offend him in our conversations? Emery told me no, she just decided she no longer thought Mike was a good match for me. She didn’t go into further details except to say that the communication with Mike had ended. In fact, the whole E-Harmony experiment had ended, which she also didn’t go into any detail about. I’m guessing Emery had made the discovery through her brief encounter with online dating that it wasn’t as easy as she had assumed. Mike and I were finished before we got started. Case closed. Dating site done. I later asked her which photos she had posted and if I could read what she had written about me. She said no. She didn’t want to share my profile with me because she thought I might be overly critical, which would have been true.

I hadn’t given any thought to the online dating experiment until now. Now, I would like to see the words Emery chose to describe her mom on a dating site. Now I want to see the traits of mine she led with, and the ones she purposely omitted. How had my daughter chosen to describe me to a stranger?


E-Harmony wasn’t Emery’s first attempt at playing matchmaker with me, although it was the one that she put the most effort into and made for the best story. Her college Anthropology professor, with whom she went to the Amazon on a study abroad, was the first. Or at least the first that I knew about or can recall. This “set up” happened when she returned from her studies in the Amazon. She arranged for the three of us to meet in his office at the University of Kansas with the intent of discussing anthropology, or so she said. Given that my degree was in anthropology, I understood her line of reasoning, but I knew it was his charm and good looks that were driving the train and not our shared field of study. It didn’t go quite as Emery had planned, as he spent the hour ranting about a clothing company with local roots that he felt was taking advantage of the Peruvian people with their overpriced clothing, while giving very little back to Peru. I agreed with him, as did Emery, but it wasn’t the direction she planned. She later learned that there was a girlfriend, or possibly a wife, so thoughts of her mom and her anthropology professor getting together were quickly dismissed. It was a failed attempt, but a winning moment. When you have a daughter who loves you so much that she starts planning and scheming with the end goal being your happiness, you are blessed beyond measure. And I was. And I am.

The E-Harmony experiment has left me with questions that hold more weight now that I will never have the answers. “Why did we…? Who was with us when we…? What was the name of the girl who was with us when we…?What were we talking about during that magical moment when we watched the sunrise over Machu Picchu? I remember it was important, but I don’t remember what it was. The answers to those questions and countless more hold more value now that I know they will never be answered.

E-Harmony is just one more missing piece in an ongoing puzzle I’ve worked on since Emery died that will never be completed. It’s like the jigsaw puzzle I tried to complete during my time on the Oregon Coast. I could see what the finished puzzle would look like on the box lid, but I didn’t finish it because many of the pieces were missing. The missing details of our shared stories are the holes in the puzzle, spread out on the yellow linoleum table.

I no longer have the person whose memory was always stronger than mine and could fill in the details I had forgotten. But the picture, missing pieces and all, is always the same; a deep love between a mother and a daughter, who were so connected that sometimes it was hard to see where one person ended and the other began (words borrowed from Emery).

My world has been rearranged, and I’m stumbling through the dance of holding love and grief together while learning how to carry Emery into a future where she will never exist physically. There are days when I see the picture and not the missing pieces, and other days, when grief is the driver, and all I see are the empty spots in the puzzle. The threads of joy—the E-Harmony memories, the time spent in a professor’s office while my daughter played matchmaker between the handsome professor, who may or may not have been married, are my counterbalance to the sadness and the missing. They make the unbearable a little bit more bearable. Sometimes, they even make me laugh.

Airports

Airports. I’ve been in them a lot lately, and I’ve recognized a pattern. They make me cry. Or at least now they do. This, I discovered several days ago in Terminal B of the Denver airport. Cycling through memories has replaced reading a book while I wait at the boarding gate. They hit me hard, both the beautiful and the difficult. They make me cry.

The last time I flew with Emery and her then-3-year-old and 5-year-old children, Emery insisted on driving to the airport. She wanted to control the schedule, and, as the one with two small children, she had earned that right. She also wanted to leave at least an hour later than I would have, which made me nervous. I like to be early, really early, for the “just in case” situations that have yet to happen.

We drove row by row through the parking garage at the Denver airport for longer than I was comfortable with. Emery reassured me that we were fine on time, but after 30 minutes of driving up and down full row after full row, she said we probably should have left earlier, and that was when the real panic set in for me. We eventually found a spot and, loaded down with luggage and two children, rushed to our gate, arriving ten minutes before boarding. Emery told me her timing was perfect because, when she travels with her children, she likes to cut it as close as she can given the limited patience kids have with travel. As a mom, I understood. As someone who is always early, I didn’t, but I loved traveling with Emery, anxiety and all. She was teaching me patience with each of our trips, although I still can’t let go of my “can’t be there too early” timeline.

Today, while I waited at the same airport, with an hour and a half to spare, I wondered how many flights Emery and I had taken together. How many places? How many different airports?

The day after Emery died, my sons and I were at the Denver airport. Thomas was flying to his home in Portland, and Grant and I were flying to LA. My daughters-in-law had been by themselves during the horrific 2 1/2 days, with constant updates on Emery’s condition via phone calls, texts, and FaceTimes. We needed each other more than ever. We needed to meet each other at doorways with tearful embraces. When we returned to Boulder two days later, we would spend the next 3 1/2 weeks together in a rented house. Our non-Jewish family sitting shiva.

While we were returning the rental car Thomas and Grant had gotten when they arrived, the attendant, in a happy, overly cheerful voice, asked us how our trip had been. Thomas responded, “Not great,” and left it at that. The agent wasn’t satisfied and continued, “How can anyone come to Colorado and not have a great time?” Thomas looked at Grant and me, shook his head, and started unloading our luggage from the car without responding. That odd feeling that life had continued without stopping after our trauma, hit hard. He was only doing his job.

When Grant and I found our seats at the gate, only a few gates down from where Thomas was, all the passengers seated near us were mothers and daughters traveling together. Or at least that’s what it looked like to me, given the emotional state I was in. So much of me was missing. I didn’t feel like a whole person. I was weary. I was lost. I couldn’t have made it through TSA, onto the train, and to the gate without Grant and Thomas directing me. I didn’t hold back my tears. Grant put his arm around me, and maybe he was also crying. I don’t remember. I was carrying the unfathomable burden of a mother’s worst nightmare, and my sons had lost their only sister. We were pacing through this new version of our lives with open wounds of grief, confused and still trying to make sense of what had happened. It had taken me multiple tries to book Grant and my flight the day before, hours after Emery died. Although booking flights was something I had done hundreds of times before, after several attempts, I ended up calling the airlines and letting them do it for me. The next day, Thomas and Grant guided me through the traveling process the following day. It’s no wonder airports make me cry. Those traumatic moments now live in every cell of my body.

The unseen burden of missing is my other piece of luggage, which I’m dragging behind me through TSA, to the gate, and onto the plane. It has me in tears at gate 49, an hour and a half before my flight. I laugh through the tears. Emery wouldn’t have even left her house yet had she been on the flight.

John Denver’s Take Me Home starts playing. Maybe it always plays, given that it is the Denver Airport, but today was the first time I heard it, and it hit me hard enough to stop typing this essay on my phone and listen. Emery loved John Denver. She also loved Elton John and Billy Joel, and once told me she had the musical tastes of someone at least 30 years older than she was. “Like me, Emery?” “ Exactly, Mom. Like you.” When she was a freshman in college, she asked me to go to a concert with her, which, along with the thoughtful gesture of inviting me, meant I would be the one to buy the tickets. She wanted to see Elton John and Billy Joel. Again, the musical taste of someone twice her age. As we were walking to the concert hall, I was confused as to which one it was being held in. Emery said, “Just follow the Land’s End jackets, Mom. They know where they’re going.” I’m not sure if there were any Land’s End jacket-wearing people on the crowded sidewalks, but I knew exactly what she was saying. It was a middle-aged crowd who knew the words to every song and sang along, my 19-year-old daughter included. She was an old soul in every sense of the word, including her taste in music.

Now I’m crying, and people are staring, and honestly, I’m so used to it that I don’t bother covering my face. I watch people walking down the concourse, wondering what their stories are and where they are going. Making up stories about the travelers was something Emery and I were very good at, a pastime that originated with my sisters and me. This time, my made-up stories were derailed by a curiosity I had never seen before at the airport. Several people, I’m guessing in their 20s, were clutching stuffed animals as they made their way to their gates. Heads bowed over a cell phone had been replaced by stuffed animals held tightly to the chest, like the ones my granddaughters would carry. It looked strange, but at the same time, it made sense because it represented comfort. I don’t own a stuffed animal, but if I did, it’s possible I’d be taking it out of my pack about now.

I have an overpacked backpack and a carry-on, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll be able to lift them into the overhead bin given their weight, but the heaviest load is the one no one can see I’m carrying: the weight of carrying love and grief at the same time. I think about the early days traveling with Emery and having her lead us to baggage claim upon arrival. I wanted her to feel comfortable navigating airports, and finding our way to the baggage claim seemed like an easy start. I was successful. Emery became more confident with airports and schedules than I’ve ever been.

Passengers begin lining up to board, and I take my place in the line, slowly making my way to the counter, where my boarding pass is scanned. I walk down the long jetway, wondering how many jetways I’ve walked down in the past 16 months. Too many. Not enough. I’ve left more than I have stayed because, even with the difficulties airports now present for me, leaving is still easier than staying.

I make my way to my seat, always by the window, and turn away from the passenger seated next to me. Tears flow down my cheeks while I look out at the familiar hive of ground activity on the tarmac. Countless flights to various destinations, and it hasn’t gotten any easier.

There is no mystery as to my new relationships with airports or why they have become so difficult for me, yet it is still hard for me to admit.

I’m going on without her.