“What’s on your mind this morning?” Facebook asked me cheerily last week. As it does daily, to any user who opens it before noon. That morning happened to be September 10th, 2017. What was on my mind? Quite a bit. It was the day before the 16th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. It was the day before Hurricane Irma was… Read More
I have a new cat. New to me, that is; she is actually 14 years old. She belonged to my friend Rupa, who died on the 4th of July this year. Intelligent, affectionate, and calm — as was Rupa herself, a glowing soul — Nomah quickly made her way into my heart. To the extent that, when I went to… Read More
You expect things like anniversaries. Like birthdays. Like Father’s Day (if he was the father of your children). Mother’s Day (if she was the mother of your children). Like “We would have been married 31 years today.” Like, looking at your watch and seeing the exact dark beat of time, when according to the death certificate, he or she crossed… Read More
We are so tired of our story, so exhausted by it. We hate going over it and over it, yet we do, obsessively (one reason we feel insane, though we are not; we’ve grieving). We have exhausted all our friends, and we try not to burden them any more; they have been so good to us, they know our story…. Read More
Three months and eighteen days after Ned’s death, I took his ashes, as per his written request, to India. This was still relatively early days, so perhaps I can be forgiven for my persistent illusion: I still thought you could somehow outsmart grief. I did not yet know that when grief wants to be felt, it will find a way to… Read More
“For months after Ned’s death I barely ate. (How could I taste, let alone digest, when my sweet partner had suddenly, absolutely vanished from the earth, could never close his eyes again in ecstasy at something so simple as a perfect baked red yam or a plate of pancakes?)” I wrote most of Passionate Vegetarian when Ned was alive. It… Read More
Grief, in the early stages; grief, after the first layer of shock has worn off: so excruciatingly painful is it, and so discontinuous with the reality we knew before death took the person we most loved in the world, that we do not want to feel it. And, as we struggle against it— for who would willingly accept such pain?… Read More
About a year ago, a friend who’s a fellow widow wrote on Facebook about the then-current phase of her grieving. She allowed me to quote her here, without identification. Her words: “… it happens, even two years down the road, this stage: the ‘stay at home, don’t want to see anyone, or do anything’ stage. “As any of you who know… Read More
Everyone who doesn’t die young will someday have a motherless Mother’s Day. This will be my fourth. Two years ago, at the get-together after poet Miller William’s memorial, his daughter, singer/songwriter/musician Lucinda Williams, said to me, “You know what’s strange? I cried the day my father told me he was through writing poetry. Could no longer do it. I haven’t cried at all… Read More
“To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season– delightful if it happens to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.” This quote, from Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, was one of my late mother’s favorites. It came… Read More
I was recently reading James Woods’ marvelous story about his late mother. It’s a Personal History column in the New Yorker, titled “The Teacher.” He is describing her death, which was what people sometimes call a good death, and his peace with it (and her, despite her imperfections and the challenges her nature gave him as a son — as all parents… Read More
It was maybe three weeks after his sudden death; the first time I had been alone in the house, without someone staying over. At perhaps three in the morning, I realized it had been awhile since I had eaten anything. I thought, with a kind of detached, looking-down-on-myself kind of logic, ‘Perhaps you should eat something, Crescent.’ I opened the refrigerator…. Read More
