[N]o one ever eats an ice-cream cone at a funeral, or a fire. The Red Cross doesn't drop ice-cream cones into third-world countries. If you're eating an ice-cream cone, it's just very hard to believe...
Young people with terminal illnesses develop a whimsical, slightly sarcastic sense of humor about it to put everyone else at ease and to serve as shining examples of grace in the face of colossally fu...
You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd n...
We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.
This is just your time, son, that’s all. Your time to hurt and bleed and tear apart your notion of what makes you who you are. Life knocks us all on our ass at some point. And then we get back up, and...
She’s pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes.
Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.
It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be...
I keep waiting for the universe to decide things for me, and the thing is, the universe has better things to do.
He was right here and nowhere to be found.
At some point, loneliness become less a condition than a habit. In time, you stop looking at your phone wondering why you can't think of anyone to call, stop getting you hair cut, stop working out, st...
If there is an afterlife, then nothing here mattered, and if there isn't an afterlife, nothing here mattered.
What do you mean by that, Paul? We are ending our sentences with names, which is the equivalent of fighters circling, looking to throw the first punch.
Wendy taught me to curse, matched my clothing, brushed my hair before school, and let me sleep in bed with her when bad dreams woke me up. She fell in love often, and with great fanfare, throwing hers...
We are injured and angry, scared and sad. Some families, like some couples, become toxic to each other after prolonged exposure.
This happens a lot, I’ve noticed. People form shiva alliances, arriving together to eliminate the risk of a one-on-one with the bereaved.
There’s no way to know what’s pissing him off right now. In my family, we don’t so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.
The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don’t believe for a minute he doesn’t know it.
Someday she'll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She'll throw temper tantrums, she'll need therapy, she'll grow breasts and have pimples, she'll fight with her parents, she'...
I’d always assumed that the people who lived in those fancy houses in the suburbs were financially better off than I was, and only once I’d joined them did I come to understand that it’s all just a mu...