cancer

I was in the room the day my mom found out she had cancer. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been, but I’m not sure if I would have believed it…

Image Credit: Tom Cowton. Fuchsia bush growing in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile circa 2004.  I was 13 the first time my mother threatened to kick me out of…

A woman who changes her hair is about to change her life. — Coco Chanel My hair started to fall out strand by strand instead of in the large, dramatic…

One spring afternoon in 1992, my mother and I went to the pet store to buy birdseed and walked out with four baby chicks. Whenever our family acquired a new…

The weird thing about getting older is how people stumble into my life whom I haven’t seen in years, it’s a time loop, someone whose whereabouts were unknown, and then…

I like the modesty of the display cases; their white frames arranged like paragraphs on the wall. Within each, a bird or a group of birds, mounted against a light…

There is no good way to open this. I can only try to make sense of the summer of 2017 when my mother lost her mind and the country seemed…

Parents Who Work, a System That Doesn’t   Giancarlo, the smog guy, always struck me as remarkably good-natured for someone who worked in a fume-filled shoebox all day. When I’d…

WOVEN is an Entropy series and dedicated safe space for essays by persons who engage with #MeToo, sexual assault and harassment, and #DomesticViolence, as well as their intersections with mental…

When I was ten, and my sister, Eunice, was eleven, we made a suicide pact. With a rusty hacksaw we snitched from my father’s workbench; we huddled on the wooden…

Image Credit: Dev Murphy   My mother called me last week to tell me she had dreamed of her sister Christy’s trip to the hospital before it happened. Minor illness.…

A third eye for sensing danger has planted itself at the base of my skull. It sends out a dull throb when the possibility of bodily harm is perceived. It’s…

Image Credit: Bailey Pennington    In that very moment—hearing the doctor strip his hands free of the latex gloves he had just used in the examination room—my worst nightmare was…

* * * Come sit and empty your pockets, child, and let us count what we’ve got. We can sort it this way: for me, love counts. And cancer counts.…