More on: mourning

THE CARDIOLOGIST SAID Max Wody’s heart was hard as iron and that’s what killed him. It shouldn’t surprise you that these words offended his wife and three daughters. Two of the girls—really I should call them women—mentioned this in their eulogies. I always knew he was a good man, but to hear what they had…

WE’D HEARD RUMORS of the difficulties that had befallen our neighbors, the Samsas, but we’d certainly never expected to become embroiled in their misfortune. In the five years that they occupied the flat opposite ours on Charlotte Street, while their familial habits offered us no grounds for complaint, they had held themselves conspicuously aloof from…

Bernadette walked from the kitchen singing “Hold On,” that song with a rising refrain. Her voice strong, she looked at each of us in turn: the woman with a bullet lodged in her head, one with a daughter dead a year, another whose unexplained anger flew loose daily. And me, the visitor trying to come…

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez (Viking, 2013) White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013) Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2013) THE DUSK OF A SUMMER EVENING in London’s Hyde Park, years ago. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, is misidentified by a woman he’s passing on the street. She smiles. “Arabie?” The author…

Psalm Ghazal I   Touch the cheek of a child and God comes in through the fingers. Open your mouth, and the devil comes in or the devil goes out. Flatter with your tongue the wine and then the hollow inside my hip. At the request of your lips, my mourning turns to dancing. Only…