When Plan A fails, Plan B has to work. It’s got to work.

Old people die.

Young people aren’t supposed to die.

Can a child’s dying really teach us how to live? It has to teach us something.

Before the accident our family was too busy, too broke, and just working too darn hard to go to the beach. After Anna’s funeral we found the time. And found the money. A sandcastle house helped. Thank you dear friends for blessings us in Fort Bragg. We so needed to make these memories for our boys right now.

This was our first trip with only our youngest four, our second family, we call them. People look at us sideways when we say this, and often we have to explain that we had our first three kids in our twenties, and started on our second family in our mid-thirties.

“Why would you do this?” bolder people ask as if we’ve given birth to something exotic and dangerous, like wild baboons, or stampeding zebras.

This response used to stump me. Why not have two families? I always wondered. A lot of people have two families. They just do it with different spouses. But I never had the courage to say this to someone bold. Sometimes I would explain we wanted a lot of kids and just needed a breather after the first three. In my more honest moments, I’d admit in our thirties God got a hold of us, and we found the faith to just go for it. To have a lot of sex, and a lot of kids.

Did I just say this out loud?

A week after Anna died, I told my hair dresser, “I think I’ve lost all my social filters. I don’t care what people think right now. I’ve always been too candid. Now I’m just out of control in my grief.”

So sex. We’ve had lots of sex. When you can’t afford to go out. Or go on vacation. Or go anywhere because you’ve given up on the American dream to live your own special dream your own special way, taking lesser jobs for lesser pay so you can more fully raise your growing family, you find sex pretty entertaining.

Catching crabs at the beach is pretty entertaining too. G2 is quite the crab-catcher. So are his brothers.

And keeping up with our growing boys is getting harder. Good thing Scott had his knee surgery and is almost like new now.

We fell into bed exhausted at night in Fort Bragg. But not before watching movies with our boys. Old favorites like Princess Bride, Secondhand Lions, and Apollo 13.

“Apollo 13 really fits us,” Scott said in the kitchen to me tonight. “I think this should be our movie.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, their mission was to walk on the moon, but they didn’t make it to the moon. The whole movie was about just making it home.”

“You mean like when the guy said, “This is NASA’s greatest disaster,” and one of the heroes turned to him and said, “With all due respect, sir, I think this will be NASA’s finest hour.”

“Maybe raising our second family will be our finest hour,” I told Scott tonight. Not because we’re older and wiser and richer like NASA in the seventies. We’re certainly older, definitely not richer, and the wiser is debatable. But we are focused on making it home now.

After losing Anna, I just want to make a happy home for our kids. It’s so easy to lose sight of this in the daily grind of making a living. Making a name for oneself: they call this building a platform now. With writing, I’ve been told again and again I must build my platform. And again and again, I’ve chosen to build my family instead.

For years, everyone insisted I lean in to a writing career. Instead, I’ve leaned into pregnancies. Lactation. Potty-training. And have no regrets here.

A week or so before our family tragedy, Sheyrl Sandberg, the author of: Lean In, lost her husband Dave in a freak gym accident while on vacation. After watching Sandberg interviewed a few years ago, I couldn’t relate to her as a CEO, and had no desire to read her bestselling book: Lean In. Then grief happened for both of us. I relate to Sandberg far more now in suffering than I ever related to her in her success.

Sandberg had this to say about losing her husband:

So many men—from those I know well to those I will likely never know—are honoring Dave’s life by spending more time with their families.

I can’t even express the gratitude I feel to my family and friends who have done so much and reassured me that they will continue to be there. In the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me endless and empty, only their faces pull me out of the isolation and fear. My appreciation for them knows no bounds.

I was talking to one of these friends about a father-child activity that Dave is not here to do. We came up with a plan to fill in for Dave. I cried to him, “But I want Dave. I want option A.” He put his arm around me and said, “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the sh*t out of option B.”

A lot of dads at Anna’s funeral felt this same way. Many men said, “I just need to spend more time with my family.”

Down to my bones, I felt this too even though I already spend a ton of time with my crew. The night before Anna’s funeral our washer flooded our laundry room. At 10:30 p.m., I used every towel in the house to clean up the mess and all I could think was, this broken washing machine doesn’t matter one bit. Crap like this doesn’t matter at all. Children matter.

The truth is: NASA’s finest hour wasn’t a moon walk, it was those astronaut dads making it home to their kids.

Anna’s death was a road sign for all of us.

Man’s Plan B is really God’s Plan A.

Forget about making money, or making a name for yourself, or making it to the moon, and just make it home for your family.