The disabilities emerged slowly. She missed milestones, started wearing glasses at four months, had eye surgery at seven months, didn’t crawl, and didn’t walk until she was almost two. I remember the day when it really sunk in…the day that she started at a school for two year olds with special needs.
The women staring with vacant eyes to someplace on the horizon. Their children at their feet. And the men wandering away. I would say “there for the grace of God go I” and give thanks. I had family. And I had support. I was not alone. I would never be homeless like that but I lived close to that place. I did.
There are more good men than shallow ones and you will be lucky enough to meet some of them. Being thin will not make you happy, or your life perfect. There will still be pain and tears and suffering irrespective of what the scales say. There will also be joy and love and happiness.
There’s something painful about living in a world where the rules have never made sense to you, where the idea of following the rules breaks your own heart, so you start making bird calls in the middle of the night, hoping someone will hear you, hoping there will be someone else out in the cold night singing.
When the video ends, we sit in stunned silence, hit hard by the loss of so many vibrant people who once lived in our neighborhood of the Bay Area. I hear soft crying around me. Applause starts quietly, ripples across the auditorium, and surges in crescendo. Now people are standing and cheering for our loved ones, for their great and final sacrifice, and the roar gives me goose bumps.
I want to believe I matter. A signal of doing something more than just posting great reads regarding violence against people whom others, too often, see not as people.
I had barely settled into the Osa when I received a phone call. I’d left the den, and Marvin acted out. His territorial instincts kicked into overdrive and he attacked another dog eyeing his food— a small dog, almost killing it. I could rush back, but that wouldn’t change anything. The unwieldiness wasn’t fascinating anymore, it was threatening. Nature had taken its course.
While the news tries to sink in, you're busy making appointments for tests and with specialists, which isn't as straightforward as it sounds. The surgeon won't see you until you've had an MRI, but you can't schedule an MRI until your insurance company OK's it. Though nobody doubts they will OK it, that's how these places work and offering to pay upfront won't help. It's byzantine. It's insulting. Welcome to cancer.
Black lace is what’s left when the mother is gone. A string of memories, a household full of items, tangible and laden and one day all of her furniture and even her wastebaskets would be sent to your house, because you were the one without a real job, just adjunct teaching and the pittance you made from your writing.
Listening to him affirm all the things he wanted for himself made me feel guilty for all the times I thought that death would be much easier for him and the family. I didn’t want him to die. I, too, wanted one last chance to help him. A part of me felt like I failed him, like the entire family failed him. I told him how much I loved him and he replied with his signature “I love you more.”
Even at nine, I knew they were a lot of money, but I also knew that coat was meant for my grandma. It wouldn’t hurt her hands, it wouldn’t hurt her feet. It would just make her feel beautiful. And she usually didn’t.
After my mother dies, sleep becomes elusive. When I close my eyes I picture her life ending. Those last days when her breath became shallow and rapid. Her tiny body overcome with the work of staying alive and dying at the same time. Visions of her oxygen tank, hospital bed and vials of Morphine and Ativan swirl behind my eyes like the tornado scene from The Wizard of Oz.
