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Aging
Into The Dark
In the old house I could see all the way up Pearsal Avenue / Until the houses and trees disappeared / Into the mud of memory. I stood at my window / And watched the comings and goings of cars, buses, men, / And especially the kid who lived next to the Hannigans.
August 2014Progeria
Those kids who age prematurely: / at seven already sclerotic & gray. / & I too!
July 2014Newfoundland
Whereas other memoirists seem to have unlimited drilling rights in the rich territory of childhood, I am largely reduced to mining the immediate past — Memoirs of the Month, as it were. My childhood is a metal milk crate, a parquet floor, a lighted button in an elevator. If only I could recall something I haven’t already remembered, one brand-new memory never before fondled, unraveled, torn, and patched.
June 2014
The Long Goodbye
Katy Butler On How Modern Medicine Decreases Our Chance Of A Good Death
It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum: Which self do we honor? The fully capable, legally responsible person I am right now, who says I don’t want any artificial barrier preventing the natural death that might await me? Or the less-aware self that I might become at a later date, who might say, “No, no. Keep me alive”?
April 2014
Sunbeams
January 2014Will is the means by which we overcome the problems that life or genes have handed us. Without it, there is no true character.
excerpted from
Still Here
Recently, a friend said to me, “You’re more human since the stroke than you were before.” This touched me profoundly. What a gift the stroke has given me, to finally learn that I don’t have to renounce my humanity in order to be spiritual — that I can be both witness and participant, both eternal spirit and aging body.
January 2014How It Would Come
When the doorbell rang, Alice put down her pencil and took another drag on her cigarette. It was nearly noon; the entire morning had somehow gotten away from her. Peering out through the yellowed blinds, she saw a Pittsfield police cruiser parked at the curb.
November 2013
Twilight Meditation Without Dog
Late-afternoon light floods the darkening sunroom. / Looking out the window, not sad, not happy, I / and the ghost of my old dog breathe in, breathe out
October 2013The Hour And The Day
I remember clearly my grandmother’s eyes on the day she became trapped between a world of knowing and a world of confusion. She was sitting at the dining-room table in my mother’s house. My three children were poised above coloring books and other art supplies like tiny soldiers, following the orders of the day.
August 2013
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