When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that ...
I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as "ordinary blessings.
their suburbia house in Brentwood" was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need.
I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure," or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.
Privilege" is something else. "Privilege" is a judgment. "Privilege" is an opinion. "Privilege" is an accusation.
Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.
In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to ...
I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.
I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills,...
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
