Author Archives: Emma Schmitz

As I write this, my parents, Diana and Jack, are likely hearing muffled morning sounds from the guest room down the hall. Hard whispers from 4-year-old Jack, tired groans from 2-year-old Maeve, and gurgles or squeaks cutting through the golden light from Gavin the newborn. I know my parents are…

The moment my parents, Diana and Jack, were in the clear two weeks after their second COVID-19 vaccine, they hopped on a plane to see their three grandchildren in Illinois. This was about a month shy of my mom’s one-year lung transplant anniversary. Their trip was everything they had…

I was born into a risk management family. My parents built a mom and pop insurance agency into a regional empire, and now my brother and I are deep in it, too. This works because my personality is naturally cautious. I don’t go on solo mountain bike rides longer…

My mom, Diana, relied on a plug-in oxygen machine to breathe, and the power was going to be shut off for days. This was back in the late summer of 2019, when she was still on the lung…

Last June, my parents and I stayed in a house in San Francisco while my mom, Diana, recovered from a single-lung transplant. Note that this was 2020 — the year of COVID-19. Because I was…

My mom, Diana, long hoped to outlive both her mother and grandmother. She accomplished that goal some years ago, and thanks to her single-lung transplant last May, she sets a new record every day. Still, everything feels fleeting. Over…

Spending a month in San Francisco is a good way to get out of your head. Some people come to the mountains, where I live, to clear their minds. I like to go where the action is in the city to fill my head with things besides my…

I don’t know if humans will recover from this pandemic: the lack of touch, the resocializing to keep our distance, the physical isolation. I have dreams where I’m in groups of happy people touching … and those dreams are actually nightmares. My mom is a hugger.

“Did you wash your hands?” That’s a question I was very familiar with long before the COVID-19 pandemic. My mom, Diana, is an obsessive hand-washer. She is also obsessive about making sure everyone else does it. She’ll merely sense my dad’s craving for…

Care-cation: an extended stay in a place away from home to care for a loved one in need. In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, we had a week or so to find a six-week-long rental in San Francisco that could house my mom, Diana, who…