I am watching for my daughter in the pack of ice skaters looping around the rink when a woman taps me on the shoulder. When I turn toward her, she nods and smiles at me, as if she is expecting an answer to a question she asked the last time we saw one another. Her…Read more »
Category: compassion
Let’s All Practice Being Uncomfortable
In the 20 years from when I finished college until March of 2012, when my father died, I didn’t write a word about him. In fact, I hardly wrote anything at all. He took up too much space, held so many words hostage in my brain, I didn’t have enough letters left to squeeze in…Read more »
You Are Already Forgiven
I knew when my father started to die, because I felt the morphine run through my own body, 3,000 miles away. Waves of nausea and that narcotic kind of calm came and went, covering over a rising panic one moment, and laying it bare the next. At the time, I was shopping at Target and…Read more »