Few of us are free of the feeling that death, that most ordinary of all ordinary facts about human existence, is also unutterably strange.

It is only as an adult that I have been able to meditate on the problem of omission, on what is missing rather than what is there, and to begin to understand that the unsaid may speak as loudly as the said.

there is a detached quality to the eulogy, as if he is surveying his childhood from a great distance, and his link to the woman who bore and suckled and cared for him is missing.

When we spoke on the telephone almost every day, I would ask her what she was doing. Often she would answer, “I’m looking at the babies.” Her oldest baby was then sixty-four.

As her daughters grew older, my mother was wary of intruding on our privacy. She believed in knocking on doors, not barging through them. She never forced conversations. When we talked, she listened to me carefully, her eyes returning to mine throughout our dialogue. When I was a teenager, she was especially careful, aware no doubt that I boiled wi

Motherhood has been and is drowned in so much sentimental nonsense with so many punitive rules for how to act and feel that it remains a cultural straitjacket, even today. The metaphor is highly conscious. The straitjacket used to restrain psychiatric patients is an apt image for what Rich meant by keeping women under male institutional control.

When we returned home on the bus every day after long hours of reading and arithmetic and sometimes tense, confusing dramas with other children, we each sat on a stool in the kitchen, ate the cookie or cake our mother had baked for us, and told her what was new. She laid out our clothes for school, put towels in the dryer so they would be warm when

My mother was proud, vain, and competitive. Despite evidence to the contrary, she claimed she never had fevers, detected spots on her clothing no one else could see, and kicked higher and harder than anyone else in her exercise classes. She spent long hours writing deep papers for a book club to which she belonged. She wanted those papers to shine,

In 1932, Ørnulf Ødegård conducted a large psychiatric study that found that the number of Norwegian immigrants treated for psychotic disorders in Minnesota was significantly higher than those of both Norwegians who had stayed put and native-born Americans of Norwegian descent. Ødegård speculated that the difference was due to the arduous realities