In her book, Bird By Bird, writer Anne Lamott tells the story of going dress shopping with her best friend, Pammy. Anne was 38 and looking for an outfit that would impress her current boyfriend. Pammy was the same age and dying of breast cancer. When Anne emerged from the dressing room wearing a short, tight […]

There’s no greater misfortune than dying alone. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No matter what anybody says about grief, and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken. Tiffanie DeBartolo

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it’s impossible to think at first how this will be possible. Eventually what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

Family relationships pertain to a plane where the ordinary rules of judgment and conduct do not apply. They are a labyrinth of tensions, quarrels and reconciliations, whose logic is self-contradictory, whose ethics stem from a cozy jungle and whose values and criteria are distorted like the curved space of a self-contained universe. It is a […]