We walk the winter road like Job’s friends, the three of us–Riley, Josh, and me, coming from a distance, the wind whipping at the hem of my black lace dress, the edge of Josh’s dark coat, the smooth ends of Riley’s brassy bob.  Riley’s eye shadow looks, I notice just this moment, like smudges of […]

I gather plates for Adam’s birthday cake; they clink in my hands. He wanted chocolate–the cake (the frosting, the ice cream), and I have already carried it in, along with the knife, long and shiny and sharp. The cake looks imperfect, and therefore perfect for us, shaped like a sweet, dark hill. I placed the […]

In the afternoon, we walk, and Riley’s normal sunshine has turned to storm, silent, brooding thick like the blanketing clouds of winter. I have stopped glancing toward her, because when I do, she glances away; and I’ve stopped asking, because my questions make her dissolve into embarrassed grief. Unintentionally, I’ve taught her that sadness has […]

Riley can’t respond to me when she’s seizing. She can’t answer my gentle pleas for her to come back, though she tries to turn her head toward me and gets locked there, looking back over her left shoulder, eyes seeing nowhere and then straining beyond even me. I glance at the clock, marking the time, […]

When Riley cries, she turns red, as though her whole body must make up for any failure to express herself clearly in words. This morning as we walk to the car, her eyes, which were already rimmed an angry color, look pink from the press of her palms as she rubs away her tears. The […]

“I’m gonna cry,” Riley says, just as her voice begins to break. A bewildered sigh escapes, and she absently touches her own cheek, as though to catch tears that haven’t yet dripped. She has just begun to tell our small group what happened to her, about the seizure that took her from school to the […]

In the yard where the chainsaw growls, I can only see blooms, white like lace, gathered and falling everywhere, spilling onto the road. They’re cutting down that tree. I want to stop and gawk, to tilt my head and ask, Why would you?   It’s a beautiful death.  I’m stunned by the yard that looks like a […]

“Hey now, offer him grace, okay?” She sits in front of me, tears pooling in the pit of the day, and I wash onions off of my hands with soap meant to smell like a sunrise sail.  It won’t be enough.  I know that, but I try anyway.  Hours from now, my fingers will still smell […]

Tuesday, and clouds thickly shroud the sky, as though in acknowledgement of this bitterly-savored day, this day when we hold remembrance on our tongues and feel it in our throats.  It was God’s hatred for death that made it something He conquered, because He couldn’t stand to have us ripped away and apart forever. Indeed, […]

I do not know all the things she has suffered. But when she comes to the door, looking empty, I think of something Mother Theresa once said about seeing Christ in His most distressing disguises.  I look in her face, and I see Christ.  And I wonder, Can she see Him now, as she looks […]