Parenthood wasn’t about blood or biology, he found; it was about a joyful willingness to give yourself over, to subordinate your own needs for someone else’s. When you loved your kids, you’d give up e...
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...
People who stay in the same town with the same friends for their entire lives never get a chance to find out who they can really be, because they will always be considered as who they were.
Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of weeds as plants whose virtues had not yet been discovered.
Sarah’s death and how it haunted you, how you were swallowed by your guilt. But your mother was at least partially responsible for how you handled that situation as well. Let’s not forget that you wer...
She’d spun a web around Maggie’s son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly. There
Shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked up things happen.
Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice.
Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home.
The choices we made ... These were the right choices. They were positive and proactive. And it was, for a time, good for everyone, most especially our boy. But were these choices really? Or were they...
The rich and vivid imagining that served her so well on the page was torture in her real life sometimes, if she let her thoughts sweep her away.
The watercolor sky—silver fading to blue fading to black, the high slice of moon and glimmering stars—reminded her that she’d always wanted to paint but didn’t know how, was in some ways afraid of the...
There was a story Chuck’s father used to tell about the boy who spread a rumor against a good doctor in the town where he lived. When the boy went to make amends, the doctor asked him to cut open a fe...
There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost.
When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn’t been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It’s been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the...
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...
When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, n...
Where I train we smack our palms and knuckles against cinderblocks. This action creates tiny fissures in the bones. When those fissures heal, the bone is stronger. I can put the blade of my palm throu...
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 patches and fewer devastated...
And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend c...
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