What I Did Not Yet Know
When surgeons wheeled away my sister, her twenty-five-year-old body so tiny and wracked with illness that there was room for a second body on the gurney, I thought about throwing myself onto the bed next to her, remembered how doctors said, even before she was born, that her life would be short and painful, that...
This Is the Room Where
I keep my keys; where I can watch the guy across the street mow his lawn shirtless; where I learned my niece was having her fourth child; where you can find Gary’s dogeared, underlined, and deeply annotated copy of “The Federalist No. 10,” written by James Madison on November 22, 1787; where I watch Real...
A Short Book on Grief
Murderers weep in their cell over the death of a dog. Dogs stop eating when their person dies. You can’t protect yourself from grief. There is no preparation that prepares. There is no border wall you can build to keep it in or out. No one escapes it, not the very wealthy, not the very...
Things That Will Make You Cry in the First Six Weeks of Your Son’s Life
The shape of his mouth when he cries—like a thick rubber band stretched to breaking. The arc of his back as he stiffens away from you, his belly filled with gas. Your hunger for him to be soft and be held. Exhaustion so deep you sleep through a feeding and wake in a pool of...
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