Why I write about loss: I write to remember. I write to forget. I write about the unspeakable to understand. By telling our stories and listening to each other’s stories, we learn what makes us similar and what connects us all.
Homage to My Father
The last time I wished my father dead, I meant it. I was on a plane home to Phoenix after visiting him in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he was in his final stage of life. As a nurse, I knew …
Sliver of Sky
. . .
Turning Sixty
Over the past few years, I’ve begun to feel age. I feel it when I turn my left arm sideways to grab something or when I extend it over my over my head (torn rotator cuff), but I decided to …
Space
Father has a space between his front teeth—he never cared to have it fixed. When he smiles, I notice the gap through which he whistles. My top teeth were buck with a space in-between. Overgrown central incisors with crooked …
The Upside of Loss
This is where the past and the future meet. This is after my mother was killed by a speeding car, after my son died in a motorcycle accident, and after my husband passed away from esophageal cancer. It’s years after …
Fathers
Ozzie Oswald Nelson, at age 13, was the youngest person ever to become an Eagle Scout. Oswald went on to become Ozzie Nelson, the father in Ozzie and Harriet. Though the show aired years before the advent of reality television, …
Ten Things \ Part Three
TEN As a young man, he called to tell you he was sick with the flu. You were concerned and asked him if he had any food in the house. “No, I haven’t been eating much,” he replied. So you …
Ten Things \ Part Two
Five When he ate malted-milk balls, he sucked the chocolate off first. Thinking you weren’t watching, he’d roll the candies from one side of his mouth to the other, making the sort of tiny noises you’d imagine a chipmunk would …
Ten Things \ Part One
These are ten things only you know now. ONE He joked that he would die young. You imagined ninety to one hundred. But “young” ended up meaning twenty-five. In the memory book the funeral home gave you there was a page …
Tribute to Jack
Tribute to Jack, a man I never met. Died March, 2010 I never met Jack, talked with him, or touched him. I only heard stories about this man from my friend—his best friend. During the month before he died, …
An Exercise on Grief
Waking on Sunday Morning My boyfriend’s cell phone vibrated on the nightstand next to his bed. It’s early Sunday morning. I’m able to tell the approximate time by the amount of refracted light that streams in from the top of …
Across the Street
The man in the house across the street is dying. I began to notice it two years ago when he suddenly stopped coming around to do chores such as raking, fixing electrical outlets that weren’t in working order, painting rotted …
Farewell My Friend
The first time I read Nora Ephron, I was in a bookstore inside the Chris Town Mall and I was young and lonely. I picked up a pink copy of “Heartburn” and sat cross-legged on the floor next to my …
The Jokester
Bill came down in a wheelchair today. He has gray hair with a display of stubble growth on his chin and cheeks. He face is sunken and his smile reveals four yellowed incisors standing up like a gate guarding his palate. He parked …
Crash
The moment after the initial car crash is what haunts me. It haunts me to the point where I have to write it down, catch the shiver of it, the tremble, the way I suppose everyone within an ear shot …