Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.
Shadows crept along the ground like slowly seeping India ink, moved up the sides of the house, and slipped through the slats on the picket fence. Sunset tinted the sky purple and pink.
She leaned back against the sliding door and wondered at the vistas she wasn’t seeing. It was all out there – the mystery, the beauty; beyond her ability to see now, but there just the same. It was simply a matter of timing and perspective, what one saw. Like with Mom. Perhaps everything had been there to be seen all along and Meredith had the wrong perspective, or not enough light.
Isabelle had traded kisses with boys as if they were pennies to be left on park benches and lost in chair cushions – meaningless.
What will we be without him?” Meredith whispered, clinging to her. “Less,” was all Nina could think of to say.
Sometimes it feels like a strength and sometimes like a weakness, but I don’t know how to stop loving him.
Some things need to be simply planted in the soft dirt of possibility.
Maybe time didn’t heal wounds exactly, but it gave you a kind of armor, or a new perspective. A.
She saw how death impacted people, saw the glazed look in their eyes, the way they shook their heads, the way their sentences broke in half as if they couldn’t decide if silence or words would release them from sorrow.
Maybe she’d thought time was more elastic, or love more forgiving.
If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary mother.
I stand up feeling my new role. I am a motherless daughter now, a sisterless woman. There is no one left of the family I was born into; there is only the family I have made. My mother is in all of us, though especially in me, and the dreams of my father to, so it is my job to be all of us now.
They might not even have tomorrow. She hated that her first time would be bathed in sorrow, steeped in a sense of having already lost what they’d just found, but that was the world now. One.
She hadn’t been where it mattered, making memories with her husband and children. Maybe she’d thought time was more elastic, or love more forgiving.
It was one of those moments – an instant of grace in a crazy, sometimes impossibly dangerous world – that changed a man’s life.
Now she knew there were a hundred ways to be lost and even more ways to be found.
We remember the missing as much as the lost, don’t we?
I can’t,” Mama finally said, and Leni thought they were the saddest, most pathetic words she’d ever heard.
Hiroshima. There are a million ways for this sick, corrupt world to end.
Meg is planning your wedding? Honey, that’s like asking the pope to plan a bar mitzvah.