mother – Writing in the Margins

What I never told my mother

I never talked to my mother about the countless sexual harassments I have experienced. Now I will never have the chance. When I asked my daughter, after her suicide attempt, why she had never come to me and told me of the bullying she had quietly suffered for years at school, her response was thatContinue reading “What I never told my mother”

How do you measure a life?

It’s my last night in Rome, and I am back at the beginning. The feeling that at any moment my grief will suffocate me. I am having difficulty swallowing. The inside of my mouth feels as if it were on fire. She was alive. And then she wasn’t. What does that even mean? What doesContinue reading “How do you measure a life?”

A Very Easy Death

I have discovered a whole new world of memoirs written by women about grief. I’m reading Simone de Beauvoir’s short, intense, and harrowing memoir A Very Easy Death, where she recounts in vivid detail the few weeks from the moment her mother fell in the bathroom, breaking her hipbone, through her hospitalization and discovery ofContinue reading “A Very Easy Death”

Grief in Rome

Rome, I have come to feel you, like home. Your streets, now yet unfamiliar to my feet. The room in which I sit to write down my grief – a library of books in this, Italian language, a white spacious desk with stacked books in both corners to deliver comfort, a soft green easy chair.Continue reading “Grief in Rome”