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First and Last
They were my first friends, and I think they will be my last. Two women who have been in my life since before I can really remember not knowing them, who were there at the very beginning and are, I hope, going to be there at the very end. I’ve written elsewhere in these pages…
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In it with me
During treatment I slept on the couch downstairs a lot. I’d like to say it was for practical reasons, and some of it was, but the honest reason is that I was more comfortable alone during that time. So the couch became mine. There were a lot of nights where I felt sick and couldn’t…
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Favorite Niece
I have two favorite nieces, and I say that on purpose, out loud, to both of them. I’ll introduce one as my favorite niece, and then a minute later I’ll introduce the other as my favorite niece, and I keep it deliberately unresolved, because they are both my favorite and I refuse to rank them.…
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I See
The paperwork said it was an emergency. It said I was self-medicating my cancer. I have never tried pot or any non-prescription medication. I have never had a drinking problem. And at the time he filed it, I wasn’t taking anything at all — I was in remission. It was a lie so total that…
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Eventually
After the breakup, the one that took me longer to recover from than I’ll comfortably admit, I did something I’d never done before. I made a list. More like a set of specifications, the kind you draw up after you’ve been burned and decided that next time you’ll be careful, as if carefulness were ever…
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Boring Money
Somewhere around late elementary and middle school, my kids started asking for cash and gift cards. I understood it. That’s the age where they know exactly what they want and would rather pick it out themselves. But I hated it. Handing a kid an envelope of money felt like the most boring thing a person…
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How scared they were
The thing I remember is the doctor’s face above me.The alarms were going off. My heart had been racing with fever for several hours, and my blood pressure was dropping, and I looked up at him and said, I feel weird. Which is such a small, stupid, insufficient thing to say when your body is…
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Each Other
They had just turned ten and eleven, and the oldest had just turned fourteen, the day I think of when I picture the three of them together. We were at Point Lobos, down past Carmel, where the big rocks meet the ocean, and my three were up on them, climbing, all three hanging on to…
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From the Back Seat
I was in the back seat with the baby. That’s where this memory starts and, in a way, where it stays, because the whole thing happened to me from the back seat, buckled in next to a car seat, watching something unfold that I had no power to stop. I don’t remember exactly where we…
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Ducks
It started with the ducks in the pool. Not real ones. Well, sometimes real ones. But mostly it was that I began seeing ducks everywhere, all at once, in a way that went past coincidence and started to feel like something. A duck floating in our swimming pool one morning. A duck at the store,…
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