Imagine standing over your dying father’s bed—his neck broken, but his soul committed to finishing his life’s work. I mean this in the loosest possible sense. But he did not: his Life’s Work, to his dying mind, was a set of articles he had started, and never finished, when he was twenty. That, and a …
Lights Out
When Imma died, or just before she died, I wrote her a love letter. I read it to her on her last day. And then I read it the next day, at her funeral. So, it’s not by accident that I did not do the same with Abba. I kept asking myself if I wanted …
Something New: Something Old
I have a new hobby. I dance in hospitals. Not only hospitals: the street, the bus stop, walking through the security to the hospital. Walking out of the security back home. A home. These are my haunting grounds. I dance in all of them. It started yesterday, as I was waiting for the bus to …
Choreography of Love
I don't love my children the way I might love milk chocolate. Loving them is like loving really stinky cheese, or coffee; it's deep and primal, complex, involving so many taste buds and the interaction between them. I am sometimes repulsed and often full of craving—occasionally simultaneously—and can't imagine my life without them. I'm not …
Stock in Hope
I’ll start from the beginning. We read the biopsy results on our way to the farmer’s market in the oldest city in Portugal—a spot I can no longer drive by without wincing. I mostly remember looking at Haffy and saying, “What the fuck? I mean: what the fuck? What the fuck.” I think I was …
Land with Olive Trees
It started, in Holland, with a black plastic spatula sent as a gag gift—a late-night Amazon delivery meant to make us laugh, as we were busy crying. It was the closest thing to a hug my two dearest friends could muster as I drifted in the wake of a family fracture, across an ocean and …
A Little Scared
After my mother died, for a brief moment that lasted a few months, I wasn't afraid of death. I had sat with her, dying, praying through and for it like I only ever did again when trying to stave it off; I had breathed in its sacred mundaneness as she exhaled her last, seen with …
Cat State
We've been traveling for 16 months now. Most accurately captured like a toddler’s age, our quest is no longer measured in weeks, not yet in years. During the first three months alone we flew ten times, carrying the kids out of beds in the middle of the night, plunking them in a car for hours …
This Way UP
On my mom’s first birthday after she died, I went out for lunch with one of her dearest friends, and one of my dearest people, Hana. Four and a half months prior, Hana took me out for brunch on my first motherless birthday, my thirtieth, and I told her I was pregnant, and she beamed …
A Zigzag Line Home
Faced with the daunting task of writing a second post, I've been going over old stuff and slowly adding it to the blog. One such piece of writing is an autobiography I wrote at 27, as I was wrapping up my time at NYU. Slightly redacted and even less edited, you can find The Calculated …
All of the Worlds 