Three letters with the power to destroy, to annihilate, to burn everything down. Too These three letters can throw the scale off balance, topple the house of cards, bring the whole damn thing down. You shake your head; I see you disagree with me. Bear with me, stay with me for a moment. Let me…
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I wish for the impossible, for the faraway lifetime that ended years ago. I wish that the earth, soft with winter rain, would feel your feet — wide and solid — walk again through our garden. And that you would gather winter squash as you did before. I wish for one more brightly-lit dinner around…
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Grief is a wilderness — sometimes I think I can see where I am supposed to go, but most of the time I can’t quite make out where the path is or how this will all settle down to something I can hold in my hands and say — ‘There. There is my loss and…
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It’s November already. Almost one year since my youngest daughter died by suicide during her first semester away at college. Even as I write those words, I have to pause and let them wash over me as though they are new words, as if this is a new grief. I don’t think these words will…
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I think some people are born broken. There’s something about the way the pieces of their soul clatter and shift discordantly inside them from the day they arrive on this earth. Yes, I know there are glorious stories about broken people who were able to rise above the blackness to fit the pieces together, who…
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When my children were young, they loved to play ‘the floor is lava.’ The object of the game was to avoid touching the floor, or certain doom would befall the unlucky one – sudden death by invisible hot lava that flowed across our carpeted living room. I would watch them careen and leap from sofa…
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Some words have more weight than others. This is a truth that my body did not understand until my daughter died. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. Growing up, your mother, or your father, or someone you trusted told you that words are just words. Brush them off, and move on, they…
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