A meditation on aging as autumn tends toward winter. — I picked the last of the late summer blooms just before the first frost. Plump-cheeked dahlias and frilly, lace-cap hydrangeas. The late afternoon sun shone through them, amber and rose, more perfect than an Instagram filter. But there wasn’t room for them on my desk. …

Before he died, Alex promised to send a sign from ‘the other side’ — It is estimated that 84% of Americans believe in an afterlife. Even some atheists and agnostics think our existence continues in some form after we exit our mortal shells. Naturally, we are curious about what to expect and keen to have more information that might prove us right or mistaken…

Death and divorce share a dance in the court of popular opinion — I met Jens only once. It was a couple of weeks before he died and his friend, and mine, Søren was visiting him to say goodbye. Søren and Jens had been neighbors in a hippy-ish enclave of Copenhagen for decades but Jens had decided to spend his final days at…

I am not a ‘half-Brit-half-African’. Complex streams of history converged to birth me into this skin. — When I was a young hospital nurse working supply, a Staff Nurse with a second-generation accent, potent Jamaican edged with South London, asked where I was from. I cheerfully described my father’s Kenyan origins and my mother’s roots in Scotland where I was born and raised. The nurse tsshed and…

The new biopic takes a myopic look at Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War so I revisited a novella in search of deeper understanding. — Movies are a powerful way of bringing history to life; if not in the way they telescope timelines and skip over various facts and contingencies, then in their ability to convey a sense of mood and personality. Our emotional senses, rather than our rational examination of data, are how we…

I expected boot camp to be life-changing for my son but for me? Not so much. — Last summer, my son enlisted in the US Marine Corps and I became a military mom. His decision didn’t catch me off guard but the impact of it, including how I understood myself as a parent and free-standing adult in the world, wasn’t what I envisioned. I sometimes refer to…

What a plate of spaghetti and a camel’s milk cappuccino taught me about life — I was passionate about food long before becoming a professional chef, a path that took me from a pub full of drunken sailors to a Michelin-rated bistro then to the exclusive world of luxury yachts where I once cooked for Billy Joel among other ’names’. Always in search of new…

Every summer brings a kaleidoscope of memories, sharp fragments captured in free fall. — CW: This story details a fatal traffic accident involving teenagers. When David died, I was out shopping for a new outfit to wear that night. My old boyfriend had turned up and I wanted to show off the party of a life I had made for myself. I had a…

If you are one of the many someones suffering from grief and loss, you know the sense of isolation that follows the funeral and its flurry of condolences. If your experience is typical, your support system melted away around the six-week mark as friends and family returned to their lives…