Aging
Life:Beginnings and Endings
Wishing all of you a beautiful Thanksgiving! Holidays invariably put me in a reflective mood. Here’s what was on my mind during my travels yesterday: The train ride between New York and Boston is a mere four hours long, but the distance I travel between my son’s Manhattan household to my mom’s Cambridge apartment seems…
Read MoreLAST STOP: THE MEMORY CARE UNIT
As my mother grew older, she regularly scoffed at the suggestion that she should consider purchasing nursing home insurance. Indeed, the thought of my powerhouse mom shut away in a long care facility seemed preposterous.
Read MoreThe Downside and Upside of Getting Older
For my older son’s wedding, one of his aunts, a professional photographer, put together a slide show of the growing up years of my son and his beautiful bride. They were both such neat kids, and I loved every minute of it. As the groom’s mom, I appeared in several photos with my then young…
Read MoreReading the Obits
“Are you reading about dead people again?” my husband asks me. “Heck, yeah.” Obituaries are a goldmine for writers
Read MoreSpring Chickens
If we’re lucky, we all get older before we die. In our youth-obsessed culture, it’s not something many of us like to think about or perhaps even acknowledge. But denial only goes so far. Here are my observations about: Six Surefire Signs You’re Not the Spring Chicken You Once Were After watching you swim laps,…
Read MoreThe Stories We Tell Ourselves
In fiction writing, we have something called the “unreliable narrator”—a story-teller that we eventually discover can’t be counted on for objective accuracy or full disclosure. We readers often end up surprised by what the “truth” is. “Truth,” however, is a slippery concept. There is a sense in which all of us are unreliable narrators. The…
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