More on: Essays

When the day of commencement came, I treated it like any other day.

I remember her first cries, high-pitched and alien, as if coming from another world into this one, into all this mystery and peril.

How deeply Brother terrified me, I realized as I walked back home.

Manu Larcenet. The Road: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Harry N. Abrams, 2024. A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eight million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at…

THERE IS A STORY I have been trying to tell. At first I began with a metaphor, but it never felt right. I rewrote this metaphor a dozen times or more, unwilling to let it go. The metaphor was both premonition and denial; it was an unconscious attempt to disguise the collapse of my marriage,…

Why did Jesus make the nights here so beautiful, soft to the touch? And did I really have a substitute explanation to offer my son?

As I watched him settle into his seat, I felt the tension in his body almost as if it were my own, as if in his taut shoulders and straight spine he was holding himself rigid against the enormity of desire pressing down on him, as I had at his age.

I offered what I could from my human heart to hers. May you be blessed with protection. May love shine its face on you. May peace turn toward you.