Sweat

Tribute

Everyone thinks Koko was the first of us to learn sign language. But anyone who eats bananas knows it was Washoe, a chimpanzee who could combine signs to create new meanings such as “water bird” for a swan and “dumb ape” meaning humans.

Devara Berger in Sea

Mapping What Is Lost

Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognizes no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Margo Fowkes in Tears

What We Keep

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies … something your hand touched some way, so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Margo Fowkes in Sea

All I Can No Longer Hold

… so much I cannot think of today, a team of white birds lifting off a shoreline and disappearing into the sun. Billy Collins

Margo Fowkes in Sea

Age-Old

Wasn’t it death that taught me to stop measuring my lifespan by length, but by width? Andrea Gibson

Jimmy and Molly wearing dark red Stanford skull caps. Jimmy is on the left wearing a white short-sleeve t-shirt. Molly is wearing light blue checked PJs

Margo Fowkes in Sea

The Enormity Of The Room

I know it may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was 92 does not diminish, it only magnifies, the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut. Stephen Colbert