In sixth grade, my family’s brand-new minivan exploded. The smell of burning rubber blotted out the smell of concession stand burgers that evening from its parking spot across the street…
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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…
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Image Credit: Ally Sobola My son wears the word “visible,” tattooed in Times Roman, on his left arm. The tattoo was a present from me for his 18th birthday. A…
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After my mother didn’t wake up; after the snow drifted down to mix with dirt like cream as the gravediggers heaped earth atop her casket; after the drive home to…
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Image Credit: Margarita Kochneva I wanted to get married in a sari but my mother wouldn’t let me. She wanted me to wear a wedding gown. “It’s universal,” she…
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Image Credit: Uyamt’s Memo In the weeks before you died, we caught flashes of blue outside your bedroom window. Jays appeared everywhere: in the woods behind the house, on…
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Prologue: It’s important to travel after a death, they say, to help process loss from a new vantage point. A month before my wedding in 2016, my mother passed away…
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The woman was limping toward me, using a black and green umbrella as a cane. I was standing at the bus stop on Second and Washington in Hoboken on a…
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My mother and I had got tangled up, like skeins. ~Jill Lepore, “The Prodigal Daughter” How does one become a detangler? ~#tangledyarn I am chasing my mother around our…
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It is not often that you stay to watch a vaulted coffin be lowered into the dark, freshly churned earth. You stare into the rectangular abyss and it stares back,…
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Image Credit: Shuttershock Mama died at home on a Sunday morning. During the cancer, our rambling two-story brick and wood home in the hills of Topanga, a rustic canyon outside…
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Rarely does a film come along that polarizes audiences immediately and intensely. But Mother! most certainly accomplishes that. The Jennifer Lawrence starring film has been labeled “divisive,” which puts it…
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[Image Credit: Elyse Holmes] My mother was propped up on pillows like a thin doll. The dusky yellow of her skin caught in the light of the bedside lamp and…
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Photo credit: Chris Teale I was in seventh grade the first time my mom asked me if I wanted to skip school to go to the mall. We were…