After I’d known him almost a year, Vic took me to Connecticut to meet his mother Virginia. I was a love-soaked girl of twenty-two. “She can be rough,” Vic warned me. “She has a temper.” “It will be
Read more →Family and Friends
I sit at one end of a pale turquoise couch in my brother’s living room. At the other end of the sofa, my frail brother sits and dozes in his baggy gray sweats. His pale head nods
Read more →Vic and I waited in a quiet room in our friend Steve’s house while the sound engineer set up his recording equipment. Vic wore thick layers of bulky clothing over his cancer swollen body. Four months before, after a severe drug reaction, he’d
Read more →The flower-decorated cake says Happy 100th Birthday. We hand out forks and napkins. Around fifty elders, over 90% women, murmur at the tables, their eyes filled with chocolate anticipation. Unlike many of us who always run late,
Read more →The phone rang. That made twenty-two calls from my mother-in-law Virginia that afternoon. I knew because my phone counts how many times a particular number dials my house on a given day. My house phone is the only
Read more →Anthony Damiani soon realized that the students who had gathered around him to learn meditation and philosophy needed psychological understanding. It was the late 1960s. We sat on lumpy cushions on the floor in the American Brahman Bookstore in Ithaca while
Read more →Lighting one candle from another – Winter night. ~Yosa Buson When I was a kid, no one helped me face catastrophe or loss. In the 1950s, everyone I knew feared a nuclear attack. Teachers told us to hide under our desks,
Read more →“I watched Vic talking on YouTube earlier today,” Deborah Gregory, poet and Jungian writer at The Liberated Sheep, wrote in a blog comment a few days after the Paris attacks. “It is the first time I have
Read more →“Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.” Carl Jung Yesterday my husband’s mom looked up at me with her nearly blind milky brown eyes and asked, “Is Vic dead?” “Yes,” I said quietly. “He died seven years
Read more →I drove blindfolded or without headlights at night. I lost my way without a map or GPS. I panicked as my car slid backwards into deep ditches. Roads were blocked and I couldn’t get home. After my
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