Post-Mortem Gift of Empathy
It would be another eight months after her funeral until I stepped foot into the apartment again. My father contacted me and told me that he wanted to get rid of everything and asked me if I wanted to come pick up her clothes, her albums, and any other possessions of my choosing. After recovering…
Mare Winningham’s Parakeet
My mother could never get along well with the neighbors. But there was one in particular who she really, really loved to hate. She nicknamed her Mare Winningham because she was the actress’s doppelgänger. In the beginning, right after they moved in, everything was copacetic. I would go over to Mare’s house to play with…
In The End, I Couldn’t Save Him – Part I
On October 4th, 2018, while my father slept in his ICU bed, I ran a horary chart with the question: “Does my father have cancer?” Less than a week earlier, I received a voicemail from him telling me that he was in the hospital. We had been in one of our estranged periods several months…
Father’s Day Musings
Every birthday, every holiday, every death anniversary (2, so far), any and every random day that a memory of my father enters my dreams or my conscious mind has sat differently for me. Sometimes the anger has taken a front seat, sometimes heartache, sometimes adoration. Much of where I happen to be pulled in that…
Mundane Nostalgia
I’ve been MIA from writing for almost a month because I’ve needed to focus my attention on my health. I won’t have definitive answers for another couple of months, but from the research I’ve done on the test results that have come in thus far, it seems that there are autoimmune and vascular issues going…
Subtle Communication From The Dead / The Pantheon Of Ancestors In The Sky
I have a working theory that the ways in which our deceased loved ones communicate to us becomes more and more subtle as more time passes since their death. The only rationale that I can come up with for this is the concept of the Seven Heavens in Judaism – as the deceased move from…
Don’t Look Outside
My mother decided to take her decorating bug from the main floor of the house to the front master bedroom upstairs. There, she trashed her outdated wooden bedframe and dressers and replaced them with more modern, plastic dressers and a waterbed. I really hated that waterbed. You had to lay completely still in order to…
PDR
During her brief periods of sobriety when she wasn’t slumped over on her armchair or away at rehab, I got the opportunity to experience quality mother-daughter time. If we weren’t taking a stroll through the park and hanging out at the playground, then we were more than likely at our neighborhood public library. Aside from…
1984 Buick Riviera
Pop-Pop took great pride in his Riviera, coming over to our house to wash it every weekend in the summer. The sound of the garage door opening first thing in the morning would wake me up and I’d jump out of bed and rush down to the basement to open the door to the garage.…
Invisible Bugs
When I was in middle school, my mother started seeing tiny bugs that no one else could see. She would point at tiny specks of dirt on the couch or a table and put them on her fingertip, waving it in your face to try to show you what she was seeing. Sometimes there’d be…
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Tales of a Suburban Barbiturate Baby 