family

  • Son

    A few nights back, my daughter, Maura, and a friend saw what appeared to them to be a supernova, a star that grew bigger and brighter and then was gone from the sky. Both she and my son were fascinated by the idea that if it actually was a dying sun that they saw that…

  • Unsung

    Attending the funeral of someone who lived life well is like completing a masters-level course in an hour and a half. Lesson after lesson flies at you and you can’t quite catch each one, but you want to hold on to all of it if you can. I attended a funeral like this today for…

  • Six

    I haven’t been able to bring myself to really read about it, let alone write about it, but it’s everywhere anyway. My friends and neighbors, and even Rob Lowe and Maria Shriver are experiencing it and writing in excruciating detail. I keep seeing references to that song by Nichole Nordeman everyone is talking about, but…

  • Joseph

    Today I met three Josephs, and each of them, as Josephs will do, pointed me to God. I met the first Joseph at his funeral. Well, I guess you could say we didn’t meet exactly, but I sang for the Mass, and got to know him a bit from the words and presence of his…

  • Christmas, Death, Birth revisited

    Earlier, I wrote about a pattern in my life that keeps coming up, and it’s modeled after three days in November of 2012 in which we celebrated my Mom’s last Christmas, mourned her death, and focused on her new life in Heaven. Now I find I go through these seasons over and over; times of…

  • Heart

    As an adult, I have dealt with heart palpitations on and off for years. It can feel like a racing or pounding in my chest, and the most scary version feels like I’m skipping beats. I have even had a full work up twice to determine the cause, wearing the holter monitor for a day…

  • Girl

    When I was a teenager, on summer days when I wasn’t working, my mother sometimes encouraged me to “call a friend and go somewhere”. Maybe she thought I was being difficult, or maybe she was hopeful that something had shifted in the landscape, but she certainly knew the truth that I couldn’t make myself say:…

  • Light

    I went walking, quiet and alone, skirt swishing, looking for light or a piece of sky to capture with a camera. At every turn, I found telephone wires, broken buildings, and overgrown trees and they blocked my view. I could just make out the outline of the sunset, or the unearthly glow that came pouring…

  • Garden

    What was your favorite book when you were a little kid? It seems to me that the books that speak to us in childhood are treasures, keys that unlock something in our lives we need for the day and from which we can draw later. Last night, I was walking through a bookstore and found…

  • Eulogy

    “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story… “ Hamilton Yesterday, I embarrassed my daughter in the checkout line of the grocery store in which she works, and I left there thinking surely, here is yet another story to tell at my funeral. This is not a rare occurrence. Through the…