Not every death calls forth celebration. But when the loss is of someone who was granted the gift of a long, good life, it’s that life that we can celebrate. I’m moved to ponder this gift—and how we who remain can celebrate it—because during a single week this past summer, I went to three different…

My house has doors built for death. When my husband and I first bought it a year ago, I won’t say I fell in love with it, but it felt like a place that could become a home. Built in the 1850s, the house has narrow stairways that appear in unexpected places and steps that…

The day of Pepper Smith’s funeral, it was a stiff fifteen degrees—ironic weather for a boy from Gulfport, Mississippi. Pepper was my dear old friend for twenty-three years; we had traversed some odd and complicated decades and had ended up living not far from one another in the D.C. area. We talked all the time,…