More on: Essays

I was six when my sister had her first breakdown.

We have never wanted to touch the dead.

My own faith is inextricable from the landscape in which I was taught to believe.

I woke today tasting salt, and there is still an ocean for me—to find or cross, as all is passage and mourning, the naming of things that one day will be no more.

I think of my chest like the inside of a grand piano, each key triggering an invisible response in the instrument’s body, releasing some build of pressure within an anatomy of hammers and strings. I think about writing. It’s always a gamble to live life without writing everything down in real time—the fear of what will be forgotten haunted by anxiety over what’s already been lost. A train of inkblots surfaces behind my eyes and disappears just as quickly, like music. I try to resist reaching for metaphors, attaching any images or words that would put distance between myself and the moment as it’s happening. I try not to feel like a failure.

Further down is the Other Brown House. It’s where a man bled his family to death, one by one, with a knife.

What was empty is slowly refilled. No outlet, just rain and evaporation. Simple.

Anna was an atheist until one month ago. Now she wants to become a nun.

In much the same way as acute myocardial infarction becomes the final fatal symptom of coronary artery disease, my daughter’s leap from the Golden Gate Bridge was the final fatal symptom of the depression, the melancholia, the psychological distress she’d suffered from most of her life.