Imagine standing over your dying father’s bed—his neck broken, but his soul committed to finishing his life’s work. I mean this in the loosest possible sense. But he did not: his Life’s Work, to his dying mind, was a set of articles he had started, and never finished, when he was twenty. That, and a …
Lights Out
When Imma died, or just before she died, I wrote her a love letter. I read it to her on her last day. And then I read it the next day, at her funeral. So, it’s not by accident that I did not do the same with Abba. I kept asking myself if I wanted …
Something New: Something Old
I have a new hobby. I dance in hospitals. Not only hospitals: the street, the bus stop, walking through the security to the hospital. Walking out of the security back home. A home. These are my haunting grounds. I dance in all of them. It started yesterday, as I was waiting for the bus to …
Choreography of Love
I don't love my children the way I might love milk chocolate. Loving them is like loving really stinky cheese, or coffee; it's deep and primal, complex, involving so many taste buds and the interaction between them. I am sometimes repulsed and often full of craving—occasionally simultaneously—and can't imagine my life without them. I'm not …
A Little Scared
After my mother died, for a brief moment that lasted a few months, I wasn't afraid of death. I had sat with her, dying, praying through and for it like I only ever did again when trying to stave it off; I had breathed in its sacred mundaneness as she exhaled her last, seen with …
This Way UP
On my mom’s first birthday after she died, I went out for lunch with one of her dearest friends, and one of my dearest people, Hana. Four and a half months prior, Hana took me out for brunch on my first motherless birthday, my thirtieth, and I told her I was pregnant, and she beamed …
All of the Worlds 