…the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my...

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

…some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

their suburbia house in Brentwood” was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children...

Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep...

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.

I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure,” or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore...