Not-yet-published pieces, stories, essays, rants, and random strangenesses

Those who have died have never left The dead are not under the earth They are in the rustling trees They are in the groaning woods ...

Marguerite Louise Russell Bachman Smith died one year ago today, ten days shy of her eighty-eighth birthday. It was a decent day. I’m...

My parents are appearing in my dreams with disturbing frequency now. After my father died in 1982, I saw him in dreams and dream-states...

Yesterday was my grand-niece Jillian’s first birthday. Six weeks after she was born, Mom got a visit from the whole tribe: my brother...

Today’s thunderstorm came a bit earlier than usual, around lunchtime, and it was particularly violent for a while. I looked out the front...

The Hindu god Shiva (who has nothing whatsoever to do with sitting shiva) is usually depicted as one of the members of the great Triad,...

A friend was checking in with me today—how things were going in Mom’s absence. I told her I was behaving as if I were grieving or...

Disturbing dreams last night; in fact, they rattled me so much that I remember ordering the dream to stop at one point. Mom and Dad and I...

In two days I’m heading out of town for the holidays. When Dad died in 1982, Mom and I couldn’t bear to celebrate that first Christmas...

I blame Adam. First he told me about Woot! and then he told me about the Wootalyzer. So it’s all his fault. And if it’s not his fault,...

This afternoon I received a call from the hospice bereavement counselor. She was lovely, and asked all the right questions: about mood...

I am not a particularly heavy sleeper. You could say I sleep like a dog, or a wolf; that is, with one ear nearly always awake, ready to...

I’ve been waking up lately with my head crammed with a bunch of disjointed thoughts. That in itself is not unusual; my head is a...

You know it’s fall when the Gala apples are better than sex and the cinnamon brooms are back in stock at the grocery store. Now, it’s...

Yesterday was Day One in several significant ways. The Great Funeral Trip is done, and Mom is resting with Dad in Maryland. Now I have an...

I was emailing a friend this morning about the first funeral, and then the second funeral, but both times I typed “first wedding” and...

Lots of family and family-of-family; a couple of neighbors; a few very dear friends of mine; a few family friends of my brothers. Flowers...

Today was the most horrific day I have ever lived through. Mom was more alert, but also more solidly in the throes of cyanosis, the...

My mother is dying. I’m sitting in a chair in her room, and she’s dying in the bed next to me. She has stopped eating. She is drinking...

Back in the 1960s, when I was a kid, I wore a dark gray fedora to church. Most adult men of that era wore them whenever they wore a suit,...