Ann Plucinak lost her dad suddenly when she was 38 just as she was leaving a job and she and her husband were relocating to a new city. The holidays came soon after her dad’s passing and the job she thought would be easy to find wasn’t. This bowlful of ick led to an 18-month period of grief, sadness and depression, which she climbed out of just in time for her 40th birthday, thanks to her work with a great therapist. Today, she’s loving that new city, found a great job and, if she wrote a memoir, it would be titled “She Thought She Was Being Funny.” Guest BioAnn Plucinak grew up in Duluth, MN (about 150 miles north of Minneapolis). After college she moved to the northeast and hasn't looked back. Since then she has lived in CT, Long Island NY, NH and now Cleveland, OH. She’s been married for 11 years and her husband, James, is pretty awesome. She has two adult stepkids and one spoiled cat named Gary. She works in field Human Resources for a craft company and enjoys spending her free time knitting and making random things with her Cricut. “In most ways,” she says, “I'm pretty boring.” Life Goes SidewaysAnn Plucinak had a really tough year the year she was 38.  It began with her husband getting a new job, which, for them, usually entails a move since they both work in retail careers. Her husband was contacted by a prospective new boss in mid-October of that year. He had a conversation with them and said he wouldn’t move after November 1, since that’s going into the holiday season and it wouldn’t be fair to his current company. Instead of slowing the conversation down, it sped it up and they made him a verbal offer on October 31, which came with a move to Cleveland.  The following weekend they went to Cleveland to look for an apartment. Ann remembers calling her dad from the airport to tell him they were moving. She had been on the East Coast for 15 years by then and Cleveland was within driving distance of her hometown. Her dad was excited that she would be so close.  They found an apartment in Cleveland and flew home on Sunday. On Monday, Ann got a call from her dad’s live-in girlfriend that her dad had fallen and was unresponsive and she should come home. She booked plane tickets and told her husband she thought he should come. By the time she got home, the doctors said there was nothing they could do. They unplugged all his life support and spent the next week making plans and saying goodbye.   They flew back to New Hampshire on a Sunday and her husband left the following Saturday to move to Cleveland and start his new job. He hadn’t started with a new company for about 15 years, so everything was new and his onboarding was going to be intense.  Ann had planned to stay behind for another six weeks, finish work and pack up their home.  Ann checked out of everything other than work. Only her immediate coworkers knew what was going on, which was fine by her. She didn’t want to have to say the words “my dad died” so she stopped doing pretty much everything else. Her coworkers also knew that being alone wasn’t going to be good for her, so they rallied around and took care of her until she could get to Cleveland in December.  Then came the “firsts,” starting with Christmas.  Do You Want to See Someone? Ann thought finding a new job would be relatively easy when she got to Cleveland. She had a couple of career paths she could follow. She worked in retail for 20 years and she was getting her master’s degree in human resources. Plus, her most recent job was at a university. But nothing was panning out and Ann started breaking down.  Her husband asked her, “Do you want to go see someone?” What he meant was, you’ve got friends all over the place, do you want to get out of here and go stay with a friend for a while. What Ann heard was, “Do you want to go to therapy?” Which turned out to be the right question. She realized that would be so helpful for her and, in fact, if...