For once, or perhaps finally, the facts of my life seem beside the point. Yes, the disagreement with a good friend that consumed most of a week turned out to be a simple miscommunication. But one hard-won act of reclamation cannot alone compensate for all the losses that just yesterday bedeviled me. Objectively, whole worlds […]

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Even towards the end of her life, my mother and I still didn’t agree on a whole lot.  For example, I would have preferred she convince Dad to keep their downtown condo with the awesome view, but they opted for a gated adult community in the suburbs.  So okay. Their choice.  But one thing Mom […]

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I confess to my shortcomings.  In fact, in the still hours before dawn, confession is what comes easiest to me.  But when I tell the whole truth about myself, I must admit to the good things, too.  This does not take place in a flash of recognition, but by grindingly slow evolution. It has taken […]

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Born in the ebullient wake of World War II, our generation largely bought into the narrative that our country was a beacon of light standing up to evil, and that goodness had and would always in the end prevail.  I confess that I so believed in our cohort’s commitment to love and justice, I was […]

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I was raised to believe that sadness is wallowing, anger uncalled for and fear self-indulgent. In its place, we picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and marched ourselves to the front lines every day in every way, in command and in control. At the same time, I always carried the suspicion that there could be […]

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At first, it is a shock to be marginalized from others’ lives, to discover that our children have grown up to live on their own and that society has somehow gone on, for better or worse, without us in the lead.  Later, it comes as another jolt to realize those times when we may no […]

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The irony of the freedom of old age is that we squander so much of it caring about others.  It is as if this great love that has us in our grip could save anyone from anything.  But alas, no. We who have endured the most decades have had the opportunity to witness patterns of […]

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All my many years, it was only during the course of my pregnancies that I had an experience of not being the center of my life. So many years invested—before and after—working to establish my value, to make a name for myself. But over the course of those 9 months, I shared my lungs, my […]

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While we may at least theoretically have some say over whom and how many we love, we have absolutely no control over who loves us.   You may well wish someone in particular would make you the object of their affection—show yourself to be worthy, deserving, attractive enough to merit favored status, and of course you […]

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When I was young, I perceived the biggest threats to meaning as coming from outside myself. I was concerned with survival and needed God’s support to help me endure the otherwise unbearable. But with age new threats arise and God is no longer the One who saves me from the struggle. In fact, I now […]

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