This month’s “After Hours” is a companion piece to an essay I wrote for Change Seven, called, “The Unexpected Beauty of Alzheimer’s,” which was written over two months ago. When I read that piece now, I see how much things have changed as my mother’s disease has progressed, […]
When my mother received her Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the spring of 2013, my sisters and I thought only of the potential horrors that lay ahead, and the slow withering away of the person we loved. What we couldn’t have foreseen were the moments of beauty, the moments of […]
As I flew into Washington, DC, last month, I knew I had an enviable view of the city below. The little, short-haul Embraer jet (read: terrifying sky Winnebago) flew in so low and slow that I could make out a bit of detail on the Washington Monument […]
This month’s “The Waiting Room” is the final installment of the three-part essay “No, You’re Not Moving to Europe.” If you missed the first two installments, catch up on Part 1: Brexit Britain, here, and Part 2: The Parallels are There, here. Squeezed Out and Warehoused With EU […]
Open the nearest paperback, crack it open, and take a good, deep whiff. Nice, right? I’m not going to tell you how many dust mites and fruiting bodies you probably just hoovered into your sinus cavity. That would ruin whatever enjoyment you just got out of that dose […]
It was a small table, barely big enough for me, my glass, and the sheaf of papers I had spread out before me, but that’s how I like my space: cozy, personal, not inviting to strangers. The total opposite of the long, communal tables in the middle of […]
In my youth, it wasn’t uncommon to see people collapse. Whole groups of them might go at once in an invisible sea swell that washed over five or ten people at a time. I’d stand in my brown upholstered church pew, shifting from foot to foot, watching as […]
On the morning the world learned that David Bowie had died of cancer, nearly every person on my London commuter train had open a copy of the local paper, its front leaf showing Bowie in all his angular and sparkling glory. The carriage was Ziggy upon Ziggy, the […]
“Finally, one night, as I sat staring at the TV with absolutely no clue what I was watching, I turned to my husband and said, ‘I think I need to talk to someone.’ He looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in many weeks, and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you do.’ And so it began.” ~ Sandy Ebner
“At what point do the parts we play– the social scripts we pick up in given contexts– become the person with whom we identify? What part of “I” is mine? And why? What does integrity mean for amnesiacs? These are questions which fiction allows me to explore as a girl who has been forged from a distance.” ~ Alina Stefanescu
