Articles
Death Cleaning and Me
I’m not Swedish, not even remotely Scandinavian. But these days any title with death in it attracts my interest. As Margareta Magnusson, who says she
May 14, 2019
Friendship
Summer Diary: Making friends, silver and gold, new and old
Old-age friendships are slightly different from those made in the past, which consisted largely of sharing whatever happened to be going on. What happens to
August 22, 2016
Cancer Gadfly
Cancer Gadfly: What’s God Got To Do With It?
I was mulling over Oliver Sacks’s mellow meditation on his terminal cancer diagnosis, when Jimmy Carter came out with his cancer story. (Curiously, both illnesses
August 24, 2015
Friendship
When a Friend You Love is Ill
Right now, I am at my desk preparing my seminar for tomorrow, but my thoughts keep straying from Holocaust testimony―this week’s subject, as it happens―to
March 6, 2014
Friendship
What I Don’t Want to Remember
There are lots of jokes about forgotten anniversaries, usually to reprove husbands who have forgotten the anniversary of their marriage. I have forgotten my own
October 10, 2013
Noted
Brooding
One morning last week when I was walking around the reservoir in Central Park with a friend we came upon these two ducks. The sight
May 9, 2013
Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books, the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be.