Where is my Victor?” my mother-in-law asks. “He died, Virginia,” I tell her quietly. Her face scrunches into a grimace. She throws her head back to the right as if to shake something off. An insect? A
Read more →Bereavement and End of Life
“I have to lie down right now,” I tell my daughter-in-law Liz as I stretch out on the floor near the wood stove. Who is this woman who has to lie down in the middle of making dinner?
Read more →A small group sat around a table in the Watkins Glen Public Library. They’d come to hear me read from Leaning into Love. I told stories and read for forty minutes and then turned it over to anyone who
Read more →I’m honored to introduce you to Ann Marie Ackermann. A mutual friend introduced me to Ann Marie because of our interest in owls as well as books. I told Ann Marie I’d had two powerful encounters with owls. She said she knew a wonderful story about
Read more →He was lucky to get a teaching job when few were available in 1973. I was lucky to have his financial and emotional support. We were both lucky because we were in love. I was also pissed
Read more →“I had a dream last night,” my husband said in a thin raspy voice. “Really?” I said. Although he’d experienced a lifetime of vibrant dreams, he’d had few during recent months fueled by prednisone, codeine, and Ambien. “Yeah. I dreamed
Read more →My flight home from Florida was threatened by another winter storm on the east coast. How I miss my husband Vic at times like this. “It’s in the hands of nature and United Air,” he would say, “so we
Read more →“You likely have cancer,” the oncologist said to Vic. With those words, my husband and I landed in a world of crisis care and lost dreams. I was (and still am) part of a women’s mythology class that had
Read more →Our ten-year-old Lab left the car reluctantly. Instead of running ahead and waiting on the dock for us to throw a stick, our water boy stood near the car door without a wag. “He has cancer,” the vet
Read more →When our two-hundred-year-old barn was in danger of falling down in 2005, we built a new one. We put large windows in the southwest corner and added pipes for plumbing. We imagined Vic would have cabin fever if he
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