Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Tag: grief
My Mother’s Face
After my father died, I found this photo in his bedroom. It was leaning against the mirror of the vanity where my mother had sat painting her nails in a room dark except for the small lamp, her red nails gleaming in the dim…
Failure of Imagination
Last night I dreamed I drowned. No. I dreamed I was writing a story about my drowning. But the details of it were so vivid, red in their terror, that I would have had to actually drown to know how to describe drowning so…
Good Luck to Me
I’m wondering if it’s a mistake that my husband’s my best friend. I see that in obituaries all the time. The surviving spouse talking about how he or she lost their best friend and I think isn’t it enough that you lost your spouse?…
Broken and Lost Things
I wait for loss. I put my hand to my neck a dozen times a day to feel the chain that holds my mother’s wedding ring. The ring is gold and very thin. If it was thinner, it would be a strand of my…
My Mother’s Face
After my father died, I found this photo in his bedroom. It was leaning against the mirror of the vanity where my mother had sat painting her nails in a room dark except for the small lamp, her red nails gleaming in the dim…
Book Mark
When my friends’ son died by suicide, I bought them a book. I can remember standing in a bookstore near the San Diego harbor, pulling book after book off the shelf, looking for just the right one that would speak to my friends’ terrible…
The Incredible Endurance of Grief
A gift-wrapped, autographed copy of Diana Nyad’s book Find A Way came in the mail today but I don’t know from whom. For a minute, I thought maybe I’d ordered it in some drunken haze but I quit that business a long time ago. Drunken glows,…
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect.
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
