How a 4th grade science project taught me to write about the moon. October 1, 2010 | 3:30 pm | Last Quarter Phase My daughter arrives home from school with a slim notebook covered with photos that represent the night — owls, a gibbous moon cut from white paper, a…

On having faith, and giving permission to let go — “How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again.” — Henry Scott Holland Dear Mom, The light is different here. If you saw how this place shines, I think you’d stop worrying about me. The light connects the landscape to every part of itself. It moves…

According to the American Cancer Society, about 600 adolescents, aged 15 to 19, die from cancer each year. In 2017, my daughter, Ana, was one of them. Ana was sick for four and a half years. During most of that time, even as her cancer progressed, I didn’t think that…

When my daughter died, I stopped trying to tame the yard and hoped, for a time, that it would swallow me whole. — When we moved into this house 22 years ago, the yard was in pristine condition. The former owner, Marie, lived here for 35 years. The older couple (now long gone) who lived next door told us that Marie spent most of her time outside working on the yard. The house…

When my daughter died, I clung tightly to her things. After my neighbor’s foreclosure, I began to let go of them. Four years ago, my former neighbor (I’ll call him “Dave”) lost his house. On the day it happened, a deputy showed up at the house and stood on the…

I want to feed Ana’s 15-year-old face into the magical AI image generator and demand that it show me what she would look like now. — Yesterday I turned to my husband and asked if he thought there was an AI tool that could age someone in a photograph. He’d started answering before thinking about why a question like that had occurred to me. “You probably have to pay for a tool like that,” Jim began…

For bereaved parents, Mother’s Day can be a perilous landscape of painful memories and heartache. Eight years ago, my husband took my daughters, then 11 and 14, to pick out Mother’s Day gifts for me. They came home with two tiny trees, a Cherokee Brave Dogwood and a Star Magnolia…

The lie is that a life is ever finished. — “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you had died at 15,” my childhood best friend said to me shortly after my daughter died. I’d been telling her about Ana’s best friends who had dropped by our house to spend time in Ana’s empty room. They did that a…

Poetry distills. It isolates. It captures. When you’re grieving, it shines a light on a very specific type of pain. “To me, that’s the gift of poetry — it shapes an endless conversation about the most important things in life.” — Caroline Kennedy I used to be an avid reader…