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The Family Plot

The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find.

The Whiskey On Her Breath

My mother left our home in an ambulance on a sunny spring morning while my sister, my brother, and I were at school. I was in the fourth grade.

Up All Night

Ovid’s Metamorphoses; sixteen yellow, legal-size pages; the Sea of Tranquility

Sunbeams

War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn’t any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone’s being worse off.

Karl Kraus

Like Wandering Ghosts

Edward Tick On How The U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers

Certainly the Vietnam veterans were made scapegoats for many of the illegal and brutal tactics of that war. Then there are the veterans of all the little forgotten wars: Grenada, Somalia, Lebanon, El Salvador, the secret ops in Africa and Eastern Europe. They are like wandering ghosts, neither honored nor recognized. Many of them are not even classified as combat veterans. I worked with one man who’d been in Somalia and taken part in the fighting around the U.S. Black Hawk helicopter that went down there. He isn’t classified as a combat veteran, and other combat vets don’t accept him because he was “in the shit” for only thirty hours. But anyone who knows the story of what happened that day in Mogadishu can see that it was enough to traumatize anybody.

These Dark Woods

When my son Tom was born, I was surprised that there was nothing physically wrong with him. I suppose this is the reaction of many first-time older parents. Proud and relieved to have a “normal” child, I had no aspirations for my son to become an artist or to graduate from Harvard or to conquer India. All I wanted for him was good health, sanity, and a shot at being whatever he desired to be.

The Last Time

A double-roof shot, an against medical advice form, a pair of champagne flutes

Sunbeams

After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes: “No hablo inglés.”

Ronnie Shakes

Through A Glass Darkly

Miriam Greenspan On Moving From Grief To Gratitude

Grief is a teacher. It tells us that we are not alone; that we are interconnected; that what connects us also breaks our hearts — which is as it should be. Most people who allow themselves to grieve fully develop an increased sense of gratitude for their own lives. That’s the alchemy: from grief to gratitude. None of us wants to go through these experiences, but they do bring us these gifts.