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Grief
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Hold Everything Lightly And Nothing Will Hurt Us
I’m driving north on I-95. The asphalt rushes beneath my tires, and when the speedometer hits eighty, the steering wheel vibrates in my hands, this little sedan protesting. The trees along the interstate burn orange and gold, and the northern half of the East Coast stretches ahead of me. I’m driving north on I-95 in October, which means I feel like someone is dying.
January 2012
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Letter To Josh’s Mom
I have a folder of her letters. It’s behind the tax returns and the manuals to DVD players long since broken. Nearly every letter Josh’s mom has ever sent me is in that folder: seventeen in all, in chronological order.
December 2011
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Light, Held Together By Water
Finally I slumped in a chair and sobbed. To grieve one death is always to grieve two. Impolite to admit, I may have been weeping mostly for myself.
October 2011
Poetry
Good Morning, Crisis
To see the feather on the filthy mat beneath the gas pedal is infinite sadness. / No more opposite a place for a feather to be, no worse way / for it to get there than how it must have come, / on the bottom of a shoe.
September 2011Fiction
Be Near Me
The last conversation I had with Hamish when he was alive and well — or seemed well, because even then the cancer had begun its work — would’ve been about nine months before the funeral. About nine months, two weeks, five days, and thirteen hours. About that.
August 2011
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Stuck With Fred
When I first met Fred, I didn’t know he’d be a thorn in my side for twenty years. I didn’t know yet what Dostoyevsky had meant when he’d said, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” I didn’t know yet that the parts of us that are the most painful, the most difficult, the least susceptible to healing are the very parts that bind us most to others.
July 2011
Fiction
Accident
They dragged him from the car (still screaming, he was later told), but they had to wait for the Jaws of Life for Anabelle, and he kept hearing that — the Jaws of Life, the Jaws of Life — and it didn’t really register what they were talking about; it was that device you see on the news that they use to pry people out of cars, and it usually means death, not life.
July 2011
Fiction
A Blessing
Grace used to meditate. She hasn’t done it for years and years, not since she met her husband and started a family. She won’t meditate today either. She won’t even think of meditation.
May 2011Poetry
Selected Poems
— from “A Prayer” | If it weren’t for Mary, who knows all too well my oblivious nature, / I’d never have noticed those tiny, crepuscular creatures / floating around in the dogs’ water bowls.
March 2011Poetry
His Name Is John
If you hadn’t named him, you could say / it wasn’t meant to be. / If you’d had another boy, / you could’ve wiped the slate clean
January 2011
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