There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden.Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.
The second kind of grief was complicated grief, which was also known in the literature as pathological bereavement and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological...
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people, she said. The hardest is with one.
That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude, and it was characteristic of Charlotte t...
She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and 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 mor...
Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally in...
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 193...
People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground t...
One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?
MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs fro...
It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but...
It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory at all but only the traces...
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael We...
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.How inadequately I appreciated the moment when...
In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from c...
If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?
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 went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues.