I'm super excited for Thanksgiving this year. My family is coming to my house, which I like because it makes me feel like a grownup, so I will be spending it with my dad, my brother, his girlfriend, and, for the first time ever, Bernie ( Read more... )

My granddad’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic church of Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, the small coal-mine-adjacent town where my dad grew up. But it was also the place where my parents were married, almost forty years before. I was there before, most recently when my grandmother passed and I attended her service, but that was ( Read more... )

My grandfather, Arthur William Roberts, passed away this week. He was the life of the party, a WWII combat veteran, a loving and supportive presence, and the man who taught me to love and be proud of my Italian heritage. He was very old and had a great life. He was at the point where he wasn't really mentally present anymore. There's no particular ( Read more... )

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I have talked about my mother’s death here before. But today, on the one-year anniversary of her passing, I want to talk about the night she died. I don’t have much point to make. This is a very disjointed, stream-of-consciousness entry. But I’m ready to talk about it, and I want to have a record of what it was like ( Read more... )

If somebody came up to you and asked, "Guess who you know who spent the afternoon taking pictures of baby graves," I'm sure by now your first, second, and third guess would be me. Hell, the dead babies in the graves would know it was me. Which makes sense, since as it so happens, that is in fact how I spent the afternoon.


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For Columbus Day weekend, I am home in Allentown for the first time since my mother died. My dad and I are having a nice, low-key time. We visited the grave of our ancestor Robert Lyle, who emigrated from Ireland with his brother in the 1700s, before America existed as a country. I don't often think of this part of the family, through which we are ( Read more... )

My dad recently has taken an interest in ancestry and genealogy. I think it has something to do with my mother’s death and a desire to preserve family history. He has made an elaborate chart of our family, both his side and my mother’s side, on Ancestry.com, partially thanks to other people who have listed our family members and allowed us to ( Read more... )

I remember when I ran the plot of my latest full-length play by morethings5. His response was, "That's such a Phoebe story." And the reason for that was that it prominently dealt with issues around babies.

I write a lot of things that have babies in them. Pregnancies, new babies, lost babies. Babies that change things, that very seriously matter. If I ever ( Read more... )