My grandmother used to tell me a a story about how Uncle Stan sent her 110 red roses on her 50th birthday and a card saying he hoped she lived to 110 (she made it to 95, so, not bad). She would show me the card, even. And then she would ask me what happened. How did a boy like that go from sending his mother 110 red roses to not talking to her?

She ( Read more... )

My grandmother and I went to China the summer I was 23. During that trip, one of our tour guides stopped to talk with me. “I had heard in America young people don’t respect their elders,” he said, “but you take such good care of your grandmother. It must not be the way I heard. Or she must have taken great care of you when you were a child.”

I just ( Read more... )

Originally published at Diana Sherman. Please leave any comments there.

How, in a house of my brethren can there be so few pens? And then maybe, I think, they aren’t my brethren in that way. In the pen and the paper and the ink and the ideas swirling away into bits of paper.

Maybe they’re my brethren simply by blood. Which isn’t simple, is it? Never ( Read more... )

Originally published at Diana Sherman. You can comment here or there.

I don’t have any appropriate prayers. Perhaps the El Malei Rachamim if I knew Hebrew - .
But Emily Dickinson… her poems can be my prayers. I think, maybe, they always have been.
Death sets a thing significant

The eye had hurried by,
Except a perished creature
Entreat us tenderly ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

This has been a hell of a week. My mother got sick on Sunday. Well, sicker. It's not like anyone on chemo is precisely well. She started vomiting and getting dehydrated and by Wednesday morning she was on an IV. Honestly, it's not that different from her standard episodes of illness. Except the chemo is likely triggering it a lot more frequently. ( Read more... )

When I was twelve or so, I had this necklace.  It was a pair of near skeletal hands holding a crystal ball.  It reminded me of Carolyn, the way her hands looked before she died.  I don't know if it was a healthy thing or not... if it could even be measured by that metric.  But it was associated with an incredibly painful period of time in my life ( Read more... )