My youngest daughter is two weeks shy of 13. In two weeks, she will leave her childhood behind her and take off on the exhilarating jet of adolescence, although in reality she is already at cruising altitude. She has grown an inch a month over the summer, and the expression of disdain on her face ri

My daughter is dating a Baptist. Well, she says, he’s not really a Baptist. He was baptized into some Protestant denomination, and he attends a church that happens to be Baptist. In any event, he is non-Catholic. My daughter is 21, almost self-supporting, a woman on the verge of everything. Sh

My grandmother did not pass on to the afterlife without leaving me something. After a life that spanned nearly a century, three generations were on hand to send her off to her Maker. Her funeral was simple and heartfelt, if a bit unorganized. The priest asked my aunt, just before the procession bega

I admit with embarrassment that I found myself, on a recent evening of very low energy, staring at the concluding segment of a television show called “Extreme Makeover.” The three women featured—note that they were all women—had been shown earlier looking the way most of us l

My mother went under the knife last summer, sacrificing her left breast to the unkind god of cancer. The uncontrolled dividing by abnormal cells, which raised a tightened, angry welt on her breast that her doctor had recommended watching for over a year, turned out to be an aggressive tumor. After t

One of my oldest friends has become a stranger. Gradually, each yearly domino has come to bear on its predecessor, until the cascade has landed here: from closest of friends to bare acquaintance. My attempts at staying in touch are met with silence. Take a hint, I tell myself.   But I can&rsquo

With each passing year, I think more fondly of a not-so-distant time in my life: my last child was a toddler, and my three older children attended the elementary school where my husband taught sixth grade. We had just built a house in the mountains, and our nation of six was secure and thriving. I w

On the Monday holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., my two older daughters and I have for some years participated in a march for peace and signed a “Women for Peace” petition. It is a small rite of passage. Those daughters, now in college, signed their way through their formative year

Two friends have taken their own lives within a short time: one by consuming more of the drugs that were killing her anyway; the other, also enslaved to drugs, who hastened his death with a bullet. The phone rings: there has been a suicide. A life is ended. Just like that.The avoidability of these d