Everything makes me cry. Peel a banana. Cry. Open the refrigerator door. Cry. Look up at the night sky and notice the beauty of the moon. Cry. Sneeze. Cry. A thousand moments in a day — every day moments, no big deal moments, just moment moments — brings tears to…

I wrote this in May 2007. Jada passed peacefully on February 20, 2022. We had 15 beautiful years with her. We call her The Hobo. Our new pet, who we brought home April 1, is our first experience with adopting a dog pound dog. In my childhood, we had purebred…

The most basic fact about being a mother is that it is the most physical thing you will ever do in your life. Unpack it: their life starts inside you. Inside you! I don’t think we give that enough credit. That little fetus feeds off you. For practically a year…

(I wrote this in 2006.) “How come you get to be called a mom if we never see you?” The 5-year-old posed that question as I was tucking him into bed. Literally, my brain would not allow me to comprehend what he had asked. …

There’s a story behind this loaf of banana bread. It starts way back at the beginning of the pandemic, when my friend Rich Swanson was whiling away time in lockdown by messing around in his kitchen. Rich is a culinary savant, able to take regular ingredients and combine them in…

They both came home for spring break back in early March, and they never left. At first, we thought it would be a few weeks. You know, until we got this whole coronavirus pandemic thing under control as a nation. With one living in New York City for college and…

The other day I was with a group of people getting together after organizing a successful event to debrief. In the pre-meeting chitchat, the age of the woman I was sitting next to came up. 67. I was stunned. I could not believe this vibrant, energetic, go-getting, world-changing woman was…

In my 20s, I was full of energy. Launching a career, launching a *life* — the possibilities were, literally, limitless. In my 30s, I was full of satisfaction. I married the best guy I had ever known, a guy who never, ever (not one single time) tried to change me…

In the summer of 2012, I sobbed for three straight days on a beach in Dennis, Mass., while I read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. There’s a paragraph in the book, almost a throw-away, really, in the John Green-scheme of things: “One of the less bullshitty conventions of…