This morning I woke up before dawn, let my mind churn for an hour, then had some hot milk and tried to go back to sleep. My feet were cold, but, too tired to get up again and give them a hot soak in the tub, I tucked one, then the other, in the crook of the opposite...

“Earl had a good death,” I said to Bonny on the phone one evening. “That’s one of the things that makes it easier for me to accept. He died the way he would have wanted to.” “He died the way we all want to!” she exclaimed. “He used to say,” his sister had commented,...

Driving back from Earl’s house the other night, I saw radiant cumulous clouds towering above the Berkeley hills, so staggeringly lofty they took my breath away. “Oh, Earl,” I thought, “If only you could see this!”

I’m now in two bereavement groups, sponsored by different organizations. When I told the psychologist doing the intake interview for the second group that I was thinking of taking the two simultaneously, he said, “Oh, no! You can take them sequentially but not...

Everything reminds me of Earl—my beat-up old Reeboks, still scuffed from our last trip to the beach; my threadbare black jeans, the only pair that still fits me, which finally split irreparably in the seat while I was prying myself out of the MG. His Christmas gifts...

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, across the street from the campus, was still decked out from Christmas with pine wreaths and branches—and eighty-eight ceremonial candles, the female priest said. The altar was draped with yellow brocade, and, between two candles, gleamed...