My friend, Karen

My friend, Karen, died a few weeks ago. She went in for a routine heart catheterization, an exploratory procedure prior to a scheduled open-heart valve replacement. Despite the routine nature of the procedure, she died. Despite intense efforts to revive her, she died. Despite an emergency surgery team scrambling together, she died. Her friends who […]

A nihilist with a gentle heart

“I am a nihilist,” Austin declared during one of our conversations around the fire. In the three days together in this remote, idyllic cottage, our conversations had run the gamut from serious to silly, personal to global. This statement did not surprise me. I’d heard it before. One of Austin’s closest friends, a professor of […]

Three days in the woods

Three days with my son, Austin, in a cottage in the woods of Southern Maine. I wasn’t sure he would join me. I wasn’t sure we were ready for that kind of time together. The previous few years had been full of drama, from moments that seemed to tear us apart for good, followed by […]