The helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human-- feeling as you went--groping in corners and opening your arms to light-- all of it part of navigating the unknown.
The earth has a mouth? Buckley asked.A big round mouth but with no lips, my father said.Jack, my mother said, laughing, stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?
She was armed to the teeth for any onslaught of sympathy.
Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions
People grow up by living.
Occasionally my mother called from California. My parents had hurried and difficult conversations. She asked after Buckley and Linsey and Holiday. She asked how the house was holded up and whether the...
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.So there are cakes and pillow...
My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. 'We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.'Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and k...
Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he’d left...
Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: She’s never coming home. A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she ne...
I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls'...
I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.
I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. I was becoming one of the many little-girl-losts. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past...
Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.
Exactly,' she said, and made her point as simply as that. There wasn't a lot of bullshit in my heaven.~pg 8
And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer...
My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gin...
I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.
I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of fa...