One Cool Dad

My dad was cool. I didn’t see him that way when I was a kid. Once I became a parent myself, I came around to acknowledging he’d been a good parent. But it wasn’t until after he passed away that I glimpsed the cool guy he was

Read more

When a Mom Dies Young

Amanda* is dying from breast cancer. In her early 40s with several young children, she recently told her husband that after she’s gone, she’d like him to remarry. Cancer drugs have sustained her life but stolen her hair. She takes them now to prevent her softening bones

Read more

A Mother Lost, a Mother Born

It’s Mother’s Day, and while I celebrate my own motherhood, I also think about my mom, who died almost 22 years ago. On the late-summer day when she gave up her brief-but-valiant battle against breast cancer, I prayed the crystalline skies would swallow my shock, that my

Read more