May 02, 2019
At the Twilight of a Dog’s Life, How Do You Know When It’s Time?
Aging is a funny thing. You’re not sure if the world has changed, or if a hundred cellular mutations have changed your place in it.
Aging is a funny thing. You’re not sure if the world has changed, or if a hundred cellular mutations have changed your place in it.
This folder contained memories I did not have, information about a family I did not know.
I believe that loving a dog is basically mortgaging future heartbreak against a decade or so of camaraderie—I’d understood this when I got Red. But when confronted with it, I felt shamefully angry at myself for even getting him.
Being disabled means hundreds of thousands of people believe they always know better than you do.
Maybe, over time, the ephemera of Jack’s life will become less explosive, like a landmine whose triggering mechanism has eroded, rendering it harmless.
My heart’s deepest desire was to see my mother again, yes, but also to glimpse a portrait of normalcy that I had never known in the years of her illness.
I have such immense anxiety. It sweeps me up into its furious winds. And my kids are at the middle of the storm.
I wonder a lot about you. Like what your name would have been if you stayed, at least a week or two until your naming ceremony was done.
In her illness, Korean food was all my Polish-American mom from Jersey wanted to eat. It was all that she could bear.
Adoption is one of those forks in the road where many of us try to glimpse through the trees to the other path, the other world.
I never would have come to Korean if not for my adoption. The language pulled me back to it, despite the decades, cultures, and continents between us.
I whisper to my great-grandmother a burden I’d like lifted, one she might take to the next world with her.
I’m stockpiling sweaters because they signify refuge, collecting them like talismans though grief cannot be avoided.
“I hated when attention was brought to my adoptee status. I was American, and that was all I wanted to be.”
“When your husband is dying and your child is on the cusp of forming actual memories, nothing in the world makes sense.”
We wanted our son to know his first mother. Was it the right choice?
I worried that my nephew considered it too late for reconnection.
“In moments like this, natural childbirth seems like magic to me.”
