You get the news about your sister in that time of night that is so late it’s actually morning. You have just finished having sex, have just finished brushing your teeth, have just finished donning the pajamas assigned to you. You’re some weird combination of empty and full, and right as you climb into bed […]
So my son and I, in keeping with things we do best, check ourselves into a hotel, and tonight, muscles all a-spasm from the scaling of a 14,265 foot peak at dawn, break into the spa and fold back the cover of the small, salt-water pool. “Um, are we supposed to be here?” my son […]
Every day now, I take my sister to receive brain radiation. She gets locked into a mask and affixed to a table, a box is lowered over her head, and she squeezes her eyes closed while a searing light steals what’s left of her cognition. And in turn, perhaps, extends her life by a few months. […]
If you really want to know about my sister, we have to go so far back. It’s why I have this resistance around mentioning her. Ever. Quiet observation tells me that there was never a more complicated story: the Pandora’s box, the inescapable Labyrinth of my sister’s very life. Trying to make sense of it—to […]
This summer, I take Lovey and Django on a three-day car trip across four states. A sixteen-year-old boy, now an equal part of our eclectic family, also joins. Somehow, it’s in this spinning of wheels and endless road that I have historically seen my kids the most. They unwind for me. Show me who you are, I silently invite. My heart […]
Before the photojournalist and I said our final goodbye, he offered me some insight in the form of a story. The story was about a soldier who’d returned from war and found himself unable to feel in the ordinary sense, the result of adapting to such heightened conditions in his years away. He pretended, in the presence […]
As an adult, all of the memories she has about him fall under one simple category: Sad Lessons on Life & Love. Still, as a child, there was Daddy. Bringing her presents and leaving her notes in his left-handed scrawl, each one confirming how absolutely wonderful she was. Feeding her on his oration and tucking her in […]
We were vacationing on the coast the night that Dad died. And when we came back, our things had all been packed up. Arrangements were made for us to live for a while in the mountains, in a pair of rooms bestowed on us by Mr. Craig, Dad’s former boss. Just for a year or two, while Mum got […]
I finally reached my sister’s hospital room on the night of Christmas Eve, in the year that I was 24, she 28. Her head was a swollen mess of bruises and stitches and blood and hair. I’d caught a ride with a stranger to find the girl I’d loved for all these awful years so close to gone that […]
Shortly after Mum threw the hammer at my little brother, I was finally awarded custody of him. It was a mixed blessing. Tripp, at 14, and I, at 24, were both relieved to have finally escaped Mum’s reach. But Tripp was already suffering from damage that would take far more than my custody of him to […]
my delusions 