They were eager to get rid of me at Mount Sinai Hospital. I had only a catastrophic health insurance policy (private insurance is expensive and I never get sick) and there was some debate over whether...
They don’t find peace. It’s pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of c...
The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.
People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression, I said. Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It’s often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the...
I’ve had my fill of cool, Willow. These days it’s kindness, honesty, and stability that impress me.
How can you desire someone who hurts you? How can you miss him so much your body aches? Maybe not him, the man he actually was, but the man I thought he was. We cling to our ideas of people, don’t we?...
There were only two ways of being in the world. You either walked through life acting out of love, or you acted out of fear.
Counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay pa...
Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised—yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil’s in the details.
When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it’s like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the hor...
We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't...
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. —John Milton, Paradise Lost
Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives i...
Hateful feelings could crop up in a marriage, like weeds pushing their way through concrete. If you weren’t vigilant, they took over quickly, like kudzu, depriving love of light and air until it withe...
For what other reason might we cling to objects, old photographs, tarnished jewelry, yellowed letters? They’re charms, little pieces of magic. When we touch them, we regain for a second what time has...
Finley felt a fresh wash of tears, a desire to run toward Eloise, to cling and to hold on. But she didn’t. She had already learned the most important lesson Eloise had to teach, though it still hurt l...
Dysfunction isn’t a choice, it’s a disease.
You know, he said. He paused a minute, as though picking his words carefully. It’s okay to disappoint people sometimes. It’s okay for us to say no simply because we don’t want to do something. Intelle...
When they’re small, they’re part of you, on you in bed, showering with you, climbing onto your lap, holding on to your leg. Slowly, slowly, they start to move away, and if you love them, if you want t...
When our actions and choices are based on fear and denial ... Well, nothing good can come of that. Ever.