That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I’d find when I walked into his room each day, his personality somehow refracted, as if I were looking at it through a prism; about whether a middle-of-the-night phone call might signify an Earth-tilting inflection point; about how devastating it was going to be to navigate the world without the beloved father I’d always looked up to.
At the end of each day, like any well-adjusted individual faced with looming, profound change, I chose to run screaming as far away from reality as I could, which is how I ended up in the arms of the 1970s Muppets. I had no grand plan. I simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they’d help keep me afloat.