George Podolsky was sitting up in bed in his striped pajamas, a laptop computer off to one side. “I want to watch people having sex,” he said to Jerry, his psychologist nephew who was there to feed him lunch. Jerry…

My body is none other than that of this island. I carry the knowledge of what is required to sustain and heal myself, I who am none other than the land. I contain the creation and destruction the seasons and…

Do something for more than a few days and it becomes normal, even the slow walk down this long hallways to visit her deathbed. In the living room we eat, make phone calls, go for walks, and she is still…

A flat gasp remains in the air. The last sigh that you released before letting go. It wasn't voluntary -- it rarely is. In a world that prizes youth and drinks the elixir of life, all you wanted was to…

Grief is Spring, that time when your tears water the seeds of change. When your knees get scraped and your fingernails get broken and filled with dirt, it’s that time when you pull out the opportunistic weeds, mound up the…

NOTE: This is personal, but I am sharing it anyway. I was sitting in the attorney's office this morning, waiting for her to bring the newest pages of the will and trust for me to sign, when I took a…

I smear charcoal onto paper. Sometimes onto canvas, sometimes on a wooden substrate. My fingers sooty from smearing the dust, they resemble blackened, overused erasers. I’m probably treating the paper the same way a mechanic treats a disposable rag –…

That they never had any children came as a disappointment to them, to Brigit especially, but they made peace with this as they also made peace with the passing of the days that aged their bodies and softened the folds…

Now we lay scrunched up and silent in cocoons. We are blind but we still sense activity outside: cliched arguments run around like ants on the kitchen counter; false algorithms, shot out of toy cannons, land with soft thuds. Oh,…

You died at 4:47 A.M. on a Thursday, which is when Stephen called me at my hotel to tell me you had left us. He told me you had finally let go, while being gently enfolded in his arms. I…

I was born into a violent family. It started generations ago in Montenegro. Always there was war and genocide. My Baba escaped with her two children, into a mining town. Violent in a different way. She had a power about…

You don't want to know about the room in which I died. It was a very public one. I think of Solzhenitsyn, and his book "The First Circle." It is exceptionally well written, right up there with "Cancer Ward" and…