In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.
I went to Newport not long ago, to see the great stone fin-de-siècle cottages in which certain rich Americans once summered. The places loom still along Bellevue Avenue and Cliff Walk, one after anoth...
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,
I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.
I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later...
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Onl...
Unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up w...
Think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense, C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought aft...
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.
Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.
They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.
The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new ethical duty t...
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.
It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.
In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me.
In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-clas...