Dear Apartment B2,
The first time I saw you, my mind reeled at the possibilities. You were big enough to hold real adult furniture, plenty of plants, and my creative projects. When New York City suffocated me, you gave me room to breathe. Within your walls I built an art station, where I painted a future I didn’t know existed. Your fire escape was my Narnia. I crawled out of my bedroom window and drifted into the pages of a book or my own writing for hours, all while getting a tan.
As time passed, my needs changed. After fourteen years, I knew in my heart that I’d outgrown you. I wanted to do more than dream on my fire escape. I needed to stop writing about how life could be and actually go out and live it.
You were my longest romance. Thank you for teaching me how to be alone and how to love myself. How to create something beautiful and how to let it go.
Tina Corrado
Oaxaca
Mexico
After twenty years of attending occasional services at my community’s temple, I finally joined last August. I was feeling a need to connect to my family’s history and to find my place in a Jewish community. I began to go to social events and a regular Rosh Hodesh (first-of-the-month) gathering. I celebrated the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the shared space of the sanctuary. The hundreds of prayers I’d memorized in childhood came back to me as I chanted and sang.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the congregation was shocked and traumatized. Services were flooded with expressions of solidarity and unquestioning loyalty to Israel. But despite the horror of Hamas’s actions, I knew there was another side: the history of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
I tried to hold both sides, ignoring the despair I felt when I went to services. When I davened (prayed), I tried to connect with other Jews around the world who were praying too—not for Israel, but for peace. But I could not ignore the outspoken opinions of the people in the pews next to me.
I’ve since left the temple and joined a local group of unaffiliated Jews. Together we protest, holding signs that read, “Jews united for a ceasefire,” and, “Don’t weaponize my grief.” We recognize and mourn the Palestinian children who have been killed by Israel with weapons supplied by the US.
In April I hosted a Passover seder with prayers of freedom for all, including Palestinians. At the end of a seder, when it is traditional for Jews in the diaspora to proclaim, “Next year in Jerusalem!” we instead hoped for next year in a free Palestine, living in peace beside Israel.
I thought I would find my Jewish community by joining the temple. In an unexpected way, I did.
Nadine Dolby
West Lafayette, Indiana
I was the hospital chaplain on call when the flight medics called in Darisabel’s case: “Level I peds trauma. Massive head and body injuries. Unresponsive.” It was clear something truly dreadful had happened.
The medevac landed, and two-year-old Darisabel was whisked into the trauma room, the victim of a horrific beating at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend. Tests confirmed there was little hope of recovery. Her heart was working, but her brain was not. Standing alongside her hospital crib in the pediatric intensive-care unit, I touched her arm and wondered how a dying child could feel so warm.
After being relieved by the overnight chaplain, I drove home. I wanted to break down, but even in the privacy of my car, I held my feelings in. I was afraid my tears, once started, wouldn’t stop.
In some ways I wasn’t a natural fit as a hospital chaplain. I didn’t pray well—at least, not the spontaneous kind of prayer I thought a hospital chaplain should offer. I was trained in grief support, though, and I’d always been a good listener. Chaplaincy had brought me closer to my goal of living my faith more purposefully. I’d just never imagined I’d be part of a trauma team tending a two-year-old.
The next morning I entered Darisabel’s room to a chorus of beeps and clicks from the machines surrounding her crib. There had been no change in her condition. She had failed two tests of brain activity. A third and final test would be performed that evening. Her hair was in pigtails, and a pink blanket lay under her head. My natural inclination was to look away, but my eyes remained fixed on her. I stroked her arm, caressed her hair, brushed my thumb along her cheek. The softness of her skin tore open my heart.
That evening I asked the overnight chaplain to attend the final brain test. Not staying with Darisabel felt like a betrayal, but I had to go to be with my own daughter, who would soon be facing thoracic surgery for a tumor in her chest. I didn’t know if it was cancerous or benign. Nor did I know what it would do to me to see Darisabel taken off life support, and I needed to stay strong for my daughter.
Darisabel would be eighteen years old now. I marvel at how present she is in my thoughts after all these years. I walked out on her, but she has never left me.
Tess Enterline
New Cumberland, Pennsylvania
When I was in college in the 1980s, I spent one January volunteering in California with the United Farm Workers Union, the organization Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta had founded in the 1960s. My plan was to meet Chavez, help out with the menial tasks that were assigned to students, write a paper, and return to campus. As the month went by, however, I became fascinated by the history of Mexican American farm labor. I wanted to be a bigger part of this heroic movement, which was tirelessly striving to make farmworkers’ lives better. While my classmates returned to college, I arranged to stay, hoping to contribute to la Causa.
I found a place in the UFW’s legal department. One day we received a call about a group of peach pickers who were in the midst of a sit-down strike. All the attorneys and paralegals were busy, so I was told to drive to the orchard to represent the union.
As I approached the orchard, I saw about two dozen workers quietly sitting under the trees. I introduced myself as a representative of the UFW, and the workers told me their labor contractor had informed them they would be earning twenty-five cents less per cubeta of peaches. No explanation had been given.
The grower and a couple of men in suits approached us. During a heated discussion, the grower revealed that he felt no obligation to explain his business practices to his workers. “They should be grateful they even have jobs,” he said, and he stormed off. When I passed his message along to the workers, they decided to walk out. We marched from the orchard, chanting, “Viva la union!” and, “Viva la justicia!”
After weeks of picketing—including an appearance by Chavez, press coverage, and lengthy negotiations—the strike ended with the original wage being reinstated and the workers receiving the back pay they’d missed while on strike.
J.B.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
In 2020 my husband was paralyzed from the waist down by a fall from a tree he was trying to trim, and I became his caregiver. We’d been married twice: first when we were both twenty-six and, after that marriage ended in divorce, again when we were forty. We were now in our mid-forties, living a new life neither of us could have envisioned.
I’ve taken on the tasks that my husband used to do: laundry, cleaning, cutting the grass, shoveling snow, and the occasional home repair. I care for our dog. I still have a full-time job, and I pay the bills and contribute to our savings and retirement funds. I try to find time to work out so I have enough endurance for each day. It has been a lonely, frightening, and exhausting existence.
After the accident, when the rehabilitation facility told my husband he only had a 3 percent chance of walking again, he asked me to give him one year. If he couldn’t make a recovery, he said, I could leave him.
He didn’t. I stayed. Still, throughout his mental breakdown two years ago, pressure-ulcer wounds, and three bone infections, plus our frequent stress-induced arguments, there have been times I’ve wanted to leave—not because I don’t love my husband, but because caring for another adult is hard as hell, no matter who they are.
I wouldn’t want to stay away for good, just enough time to rest and to remind myself of how much I love this man: so much I married him twice.
M.C.
Detroit, Michigan
When the news program I was producing went to break, I threw down the papers in my hands and yelled, “I can’t take this anymore!” I walked out of the studio and wandered the streets of lower Manhattan until I arrived at the water. Then I sat down on a bench and cried.
I had worked at a progressive media nonprofit for three years. Together as a staff we had weathered 9/11, anthrax scares, and the invasion of Iraq. Unlike my peers in the mainstream media, I had the freedom to write about the civilian carnage in Iraqi hospitals and to air interviews with experts who knew damn well the US military would find no weapons of mass destruction. At night I had terrible dreams, only to wake the next morning knowing that new horrors were waiting to be documented.
I could take all of this because I believed in the work. I believed that Americans were ignorant, betrayed by the mainstream media’s greedy pursuit of profit. It was my job to tell them the truth. But could I continue to endure my boss’s harsh treatment? She yelled at the staff daily. People were frequently reduced to tears, and turnover was high. As her right-hand woman, I had tried many times to talk to her. Sometimes she would mellow for a few days, but the abuse always resumed. Eventually I quit trying.
When I’d been promoted, I’d promised myself that I would protect the less-experienced producers from her. I succeeded for a while, but over time I became pale, sick, and exhausted. Worst of all, I began treating people the way she did: shouting at them and belittling them. I was becoming what I despised.
I got up from that bench and took a three-month break, during which I went on my first solo backpacking trip. When I returned to New York, I was out of a job but back to my true self.
I left more than the news organization that day. I also left behind my naive belief in a black-and-white world where everyone was either good or bad, and only good people possessed the truth, and I was one of those people.
Name Withheld
When I was a sophomore in high school, I wanted to upgrade my summer job from mowing neighbors’ lawns to something more lucrative. My father had recently been hired as a greenkeeper at a golf course. He talked to the foreman, and they brought me on staff. It was easy work, picking up soil plugs from the greens and filling golf-ball cleaners with soap. I even got to zoom around the course in golf carts and utility vehicles.
After a few days on the job I got a call on my walkie-talkie: “Come to the pond. There’s a clog.” I drove over and saw the rest of our crew up to their waists in sludge. “Get in there and help them,” the foreman told me.
“No,” I blurted out. “Not even if I had a wet suit!”
“Go home, then!”
That went well, I thought to myself. He’s giving me the day off!
The next morning, when the foreman saw me clocking in, he asked, “What are you doing here?”
I’d actually thought I still had a job.
Thomas Pierik
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Twenty years ago my then-ninety-two-year-old grandmother revealed a secret she’d kept since childhood: When she was a young girl, her mother had taken her and her little brother by the hand and walked into the frigid waters of Puget Sound. She kept going farther and farther out, as if to drown all three of them. Then suddenly she turned back to shore. Afterward she never said a word about it.
The story stayed with me. I often tried to draw the scene on scraps of paper: three figures walking into the waves in their woolens and boots. I felt as though it carried a message for me.
Three years ago, after my mother passed away and my daughter went to college, I left my job and friends in North Carolina and moved with my husband to an island in Puget Sound, where we built a small house. I thought the change would lighten my load, but instead I felt heavy, as if something were weighing me down. When I looked at the trees, I started to think about nooses. I imagined jumping off a ferry—and even scoped out its security cameras—so I could sink into the depths of the sound. I thought I understood my grandmother’s story now: Her mother had been looking not for death but for refuge among the seaweed beds, the caresses of fish, the watchful gazes of whales.
Then I walked out of my marriage. And I realized it wasn’t freedom that I’d needed; it was happiness. I’d had to strip away every social connection—students, friends, colleagues—to finally see that I was lonely in my marriage, and it was killing me. What had attracted me to the story of a near-drowning wasn’t the desire to end it all. It was the possibility of turning back to shore.
Diane Mines
Seattle, Washington
While I was in graduate school, I played in a band and supplemented my paltry student stipend with gigs at local clubs. The late nights were a drag, but the group was gaining momentum.
By my mid-twenties I realized the late-night lifestyle was unsustainable. By then I had also become disillusioned with my coursework in biomedical engineering, and I decided to apply to medical school. I did unexpectedly well on the MCAT and got in. For the first year I continued playing in the band, but the multitasking was too hard, and I quit.
My medical career was fulfilling in every way except one: I’d traded late nights at clubs for late nights on call at the hospital. I still couldn’t get any sleep.
Keith Dickerson
Grand Junction, Colorado
Our neighborhood church was a “reconciling congregation,” the Methodist phrase indicating that it welcomed gay and lesbian worshippers. After my partner, Heather, and I had attended for several months, the pastor asked if we wanted to become members. She mentioned that membership would allow us to be married in the church.
This was in 1991, and Heather and I didn’t know any same-sex couples who had openly celebrated marriages. We met with our pastor to discuss what the ceremony would look like. Eventually we decided to move ahead, but we stopped short of calling it a “marriage,” settling on a “public celebration of commitment.”
After the plans were made, the Methodist hierarchy informed our pastor that our ceremony could not be held in the church building. We arranged to rent another space. Then, four days before the celebration of commitment, on Christmas Eve, the bishop notified our pastor that if she presided over the proceedings, she would risk her ministerial credentials. I called the bishop to protest, and she told me that even though we weren’t using the word marriage, our pastor could not bless us in public. She encouraged us to advocate “from the pews.”
Heather and I went ahead with a modified celebration that didn’t include our pastor. Though the event was joyful, our experience with the Methodist leadership left us feeling humiliated and angry.
Many people have asked us why we did not leave the church then. I believed that when your community is struggling, you should stick with it and try to make it better. Heather and I attended meetings where we helped strategize ways to move the church forward, and I accepted an invitation to be a representative for the reconciling-congregations movement. Every time someone asked me what it meant for the church to be “reconciling,” I would say, “Well, it screwed us, but . . .” After a while I realized the church deserved a voice with a more authentic experience of what it meant to be welcomed.
I met with our church’s new pastor and told him I needed to resign. I assumed he would listen and acknowledge the conflict of interest I was experiencing. Instead he told me our church was the best in town for gay people, and if he had been in charge when Heather and I were married, what happened to us wouldn’t have happened. Although I had never considered leaving the church, I walked out the door and knew without a doubt I wouldn’t return.
Annika Fjelstad
Minneapolis, Minnesota
In March 2023 my family decided to escape Afghanistan with the help of a smuggler. The Taliban had retaken control, and my sisters and I could no longer attend university. My brother, an investigative journalist who reported on the Taliban’s actions, could have been arrested at any time.
The smuggler gave us two options of where to cross the border into Pakistan: from Kandahar Province, which was nearby but dangerous; or Helmand Province, which would require a long journey on foot but was safer. We decided to go to Helmand.
The smuggler arranged for three cars to take us part of the way. He told us we would find no water or food on our path, so we carried backpacks full of supplies, along with phones and flashlights. After the cars dropped us off, we walked through a desert and a burning plain where no living thing could be seen. Our water and food ran out quickly. Finally we reached the border and passed under the wire, thrilled to find the guards asleep.
Still we had to walk through mountains to reach Quetta, our final destination. There were children and elderly people in our group. One baby was only twenty days old, and his mother grew so tired that others had to take care of him. The rocky terrain hurt our feet, and we were all desperately thirsty.
One of the travelers called the smuggler, who said he’d ask a colleague to bring us water. When a car’s headlights approached, we watched warily, afraid it might be the Pakistani police coming to deport us, but it wasn’t. The smuggler’s partner brought us just enough water for the rest of our trip. The next afternoon we arrived in Quetta, exhausted but free.
A.H.
Pakistan
After a twenty-hour shift, I arrived home looking forward to time with my kids, a shower, and a warm bed, but when I came through the door, all five children—my three and my husband’s two daughters—were sitting on their hands in a row of chairs in the living room. My oldest son’s face wore a look of helplessness I had never seen on him before.
“One of them broke the back off the remote,” my husband said.
I asked how long they’d been sitting in the chairs.
“Almost two hours. Nobody will own up to doing it.”
Good for them, I thought.
This was just the latest instance of my husband’s harsh discipline and words. There was the time he’d told the kids he was going to start dating other women because he no longer found me attractive. The countless times he’d gotten rid of a kid’s hiccups by scaring them with threats of punishment. The family nights that had been canceled because one of the kids had left the refrigerator open or forgotten to make their bed.
My exhaustion was quickly replaced by adrenaline. “Grab your bags,” I said to my three kids. They each went to their room, grabbed a small bag that had been stashed there for weeks, and headed to my car. I followed them, leaving my husband with his mouth agape.
I drove around the corner, then pulled over. This was as far as my plan went. My heart pulsed in my ears. Would I ever see my stepdaughters again? Was I doing them a disservice by leaving? Would my kids’ dad help me? Where would I go next?
I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked back, and my youngest son was holding his hand up for a high five. I gave him one and put the car in drive.
P.S.
Buckley, Washington
Looking around at the majority-female med-school classroom, I figured sexism in medical education was dead. I’d heard stories about misogyny and sexual abuse during training, but I was certain I had entered the field during a more enlightened time.
During my surgery rotation, I arrived every day ready to be quizzed. I obsessively studied anatomy so I could answer quickly when the surgeons pointed to vessels or tiny ducts. I practiced my sterile procedure over and over to avoid accidentally contaminating the operating field.
My attending physicians—all male—were often disrespectful and egotistical. I witnessed one of them body-shame an unconscious patient and another one describe his grading system for nurses’ bodies.
Toward the end of my rotation I was assigned to work with an older vascular surgeon with a middle-aged male assistant. Our first case together was a carotid endarterectomy—a procedure to remove plaque buildup from the neck arteries. I used a retractor to hold the incision site open while the surgeon scraped the carotid artery. As he worked, the surgeon told his assistant about a recent trip to a strip joint. He described one dancer in lecherous detail: her breasts, her buttocks, her pubic hair. He said he had placed a quarter on the top of his beer bottle, and she’d squatted on it. “And when she stood up, it was gone!” he crowed.
Women have been sewing clothes and quilts and torn vaginas for free for hundreds of years, yet this dirtbag was probably making $700,000 a year for his stitches. I let go of the retractor and dropped my gloved hands to my sides, out of the sterile field. “I’m contaminated,” I said. Tearing off my paper gown, I left.
Julia McDonald
Augusta, Maine
In 2009 I graduated from university and began preparing for a gap year of hiking in South America. My mother insisted I buy the largest backpack on the market, if not the planet: a cherry-red, ninety-liter behemoth nearly as tall as I was.
Once filled with six months’ worth of clothing and a family-size pack of Imodium, the Red Beast was nearly immovable. I had to strap it on while seated on the floor, then lever myself up like a stick insect. It took every bit of my core strength to stay upright. On the day of my departure, just walking from the hotel to the cab prompted serious doubts about the trip. How was I going to toddle from Ecuador to Argentina like this?
When I landed in Quito, the gods smiled on me: the Red Beast hadn’t made it onto the last leg of my flight. I strode into the Andean air with nothing but the clothes on my back and my carry-on. Luckily I’d listened to my mother and packed extra Imodium for the flight.
Daniel Seifert
Singapore
When I was twenty-one, I lost my faith. I sat in my car in my parents’ driveway, paralyzed by the thought that I had no idea what I believed in. Who was I without the God I had always trusted?
My father was a Southern Baptist minister. My mother’s worst fear, when we’d moved from the Bible Belt to Massachusetts, was that one of her children would marry a Catholic. Sleepovers with my Catholic girlfriends often included religious debates, and I argued vehemently for Protestantism, citing the positions my parents had taught me. I stayed true to my beliefs through high school, participating in our church’s youth group and avoiding parties. My dad and I would have long conversations about God at the dinner table, and I basked in his pride in me.
My crisis of faith began a few years later, when I was nineteen and engaged to my high school sweetheart. Being good Christians, we were abstaining from sex before marriage (well, from intercourse), and the wedding night couldn’t come fast enough. But the closer we got to the date, the more my desire dwindled. By the time we got married, it was gone.
When it still hadn’t returned months later, I started to panic. I read books about sex and called my sister, who suggested I try to relax. My husband was kind and patient, but I felt guilty. Though I performed my duty as a wife, I didn’t like it, and he knew it.
I told a Christian therapist about my troubles, but somehow our conversations kept turning to my religious doubts. In our third session I asked when we were going to talk about my sex problem.
“We already are,” she replied.
She said I was a truth-seeker. At her encouragement, I began to look outside of my religion and to read books that didn’t come from the Christian bookstore. I started to see slivers of my authentic self.
My desire for sex eventually returned, but my marriage didn’t survive my budding awakening. Feeling more confident and ambitious, I decided to go to college and have a career—choices that didn’t fit my old vision of what a Christian woman should do. Searching for a new way to believe, I found myself drawn to Eastern philosophies, though I refused to attach myself to any single way of thinking.
My parents didn’t express their disappointment in me, but I know they would never stop praying that I’d return to their beliefs. For the rest of my dad’s life, he blamed my therapist for my decision to abandon the faith. Yet I think there was also a part of him that understood.
Though I stopped believing in heaven and hell long ago, I’m open to the idea of an afterlife where we’ll see our loved ones again. I sometimes fantasize about having long talks with my dad like we used to. Maybe we’ll finally be on the same page again.
Christine O’Brien
Richmond, Virginia
“If you don’t let me, I’ll run away!” I yelled at my mother.
“I already said no,” she responded calmly. I hesitated, waiting to see if she’d change her mind, but she continued reading her book. I don’t even remember what I wanted to do, but it must have been important in my six-year-old mind, because I ran to my bedroom, grabbed my raincoat, then marched back to the living room. Still my mother didn’t look up. So I walked out of the house. I tried to slam the screen door behind me, but it just bounced back.
My first big decision, now that I was on my own, was whether to turn left or right. I chose right because I had a few friends who lived that way. Maybe I could stay with one of them for a while.
About a hundred yards from my house was an oily puddle containing a beautiful rainbow. While I was staring at the colors, I noticed an earthworm in the water. I thought about pulling it out with a stick, but it was too late. The worm had drowned.
I started crying. What had happened to that worm would happen to me, I felt certain, and nobody would notice or care. I sat in the wet grass beside the road and sobbed for a long time. Finally, as it was getting dark, I decided to go home.
My mother was in the kitchen, making dinner for the family: spaghetti with meatballs. I could smell the tomato sauce as soon as I opened the front door. I snuck into my bedroom, took off my wet clothes, and put on my pajamas. When my mother yelled, “Supper’s ready!” I joined my parents and siblings at the table.
Nobody said anything about my running away. I realized my mother hadn’t told them.
Noticing my pajamas, my father asked, “Are you sick?”
“No,” I replied, stabbing my fork into a fat, juicy meatball. “I’m OK.”
Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington
All of us in prison dream about the day we’ll leave. I’ve been here for barely three years, but a few of my friends have reached double digits. Every morning I take a few minutes to look through the barred window at the forest that surrounds us, and I try to imagine what it would be like to touch one of those trees. I picture myself walking barefoot through the grass, sharp twigs poking my toes and the smell of the damp earth surrounding me.
I don’t care about buying a flashy car or hooking up with as many women as possible, like a lot of the other men fantasize about doing after they leave this place. I just want to be in nature with trees, flowers, and soft, life-giving dirt. Every living thing I was too busy to appreciate before is calling to me now, just out of my reach.
Quinten Yonkers
Suffield, Connecticut
After I was disciplined for violating the dress code in middle school, I wrote a seething letter to the principal about unequal expectations for boys and girls and how the school system catered to the patriarchy. My mother urged me not to send it, worried about how it might affect my educational prospects. She’d fought hard to secure a promising future for me since she’d immigrated to the US, and she always advised me to keep my head down. I rolled my eyes at her caution, chiding her for being complacent. I was an activist, safeguarding the rights of my peers.
I’m now a graduate student at Yale. When students walked out of class to protest the genocide in Gaza, I failed to join them. I didn’t participate in the encampments activists erected on campus. In fact, when I saw the police coming to dismantle the sites while I was on my morning run, I didn’t even stop to think about why they were there.
I’m sitting with an uncomfortable truth: I’ve grown complicit. I’ll only help out if it doesn’t compromise my own security. I want to safeguard my degree and career—not for a better life for my future children, but for myself.
Kelly Dunn
New Haven, Connecticut
I met Steph when she cruised into the hotel parking lot in Cape Town to pick up my husband and me for a six-day group tour along South Africa’s famed Garden Route. She flashed me her toothpaste-commercial smile and asked, “Howzit?” and I felt a lightning bolt run through my body.
For the next several days I finagled my way into the passenger seat next to our charming tour guide. I was taken by Steph’s passion for South Africa, and her sexy accent didn’t hurt, either. The more we talked, the more my heart ached.
When the tour ended, Steph called out, “Keep in touch!” as she drove away.
I returned to my formerly satisfying life in San Francisco, but everything felt different. My husband and I had recently purchased our dream house, an 1868 “Victorian lady,” but I’d lost interest in home-improvement projects. Steph and I messaged each other daily while I tried to deny my growing feelings for her. I was a married woman with plans to start a family. What was I doing pining for someone I’d known in person for only six days?
Several months later Steph invited me on a camping trip in Namibia. I thought long and hard about what joining her would mean. I knew my marriage would likely end, after many wonderful years with the kindest man I’d ever known. But I also needed to find out if there was something worth flipping my world upside down for.
My plane landed in Cape Town on March 3, 2018. Steph and I made it only as far as the airport parking lot before we kissed. We laughed and admitted we were relieved to have gotten that out of the way before we started our trip.
The past six years have simultaneously been the most heart-wrenching and heartwarming of my life. It took courage to come out to my ex-husband (who is still a dear friend) and to my shocked friends and family, but I can’t imagine the alternative.
Jessica Wellar
Bellefonte, Pennsylvania
From 1957 to 1959 I attended a strict religious college in my hometown. Because I lived off campus, I had privileges that the students who lived in the dorms did not: I could attend movies and dances; I could play cards (even though they displayed the devil’s symbols); and I could wear a ring if I got engaged. (The dormitory girls accepted a watch on the big occasion.)
The other students, worried about my off-campus lifestyle, repeatedly asked, “Have you been saved by the blood of the Lamb?”
I made up an answer to fend them off: “Yes, in the summer of 1955, at a camp meeting with Pastor Peter.”
I became friendly with some coeds who begged me to go to church with them. When a revival came to town, I gave in and went. The girls and I sat near the front. The preacher’s cheeks blazed red, and his voice grew strained as he delivered his sermon. When he called for people to come forward to commit themselves to Jesus, one of the girls nudged me to go.
“I’ve already been saved,” I hissed.
“That’s what you say,” she replied.
I suddenly felt an unholy storm brewing in my stomach, and a wave of nausea overtook me. Afraid I was going to be sick, I stood and fought my way down the row, stepping on toes and bumping knees. My fellow congregants assumed I was answering the call. “God hears you,” they said. “Go to Him, sweetheart!”
Instead I rushed to the door at the back of the sanctuary, only to find it wouldn’t open. A man came over to help, but before he could open the door, I unloaded a torrent of vomit on the carpet. “My word,” he said.
I walked the five blocks to my grandma’s house as fast as I could.
“You’re home early,” she said when I burst into the living room.
“I got saved!” I told her, and I ran to the bathroom.
Annie Garcia
Hillsboro, Oregon
I’ve been a volunteer gardener at a small end-of-life residence for the past two years. Our residents arrive on stretchers or in wheelchairs and are cared for by a small but mighty staff and a group of trained volunteers.
When a resident dies, they are transported from their room to the hearse in a ritual called the “walk out”: Their body is draped in a handmade quilt. The family walk alongside the gurney as their loved one is wheeled from the room. Staff and volunteers line the corridor, scattering flower petals, then follow the procession outside to say their farewells. Sometimes music is played or a reading is given.
It’s a beautiful ritual honoring the passage from life to death, a reminder of how tenuous our time on earth is. It’s amazing how a moment filled with grief can also be so therapeutic. I started coming here to garden, but now I want to learn how to befriend my own eventual transition.
Dawn McLean
Portland, Oregon
