Rumi said it best: “Grief can be the garden of compassion.” I spotted this quote as I sat in my garden grieving over the sudden death of our 26-year-old daughter. Jogging with her fiancé in New York Central Park on…
It’s spring in some places now. And in some places, it will be winter for another couple of weeks (months?). Somewhere the tulips are beginning to push through the soft earth and somewhere the birds are returning to sing. Somewhere…
Shortly after Nina died, I remember well-meaning friends talking to me about hope. My reply was usually, “What was there to have hope about?” The only thing I prayed and hoped for was that my daughter would come back again,…
Time rushes on. When you bury a child, you realize this. Your feet are firmly planted in the quicksand of grief while the rest of the world goes on as though nothing has happened. Oh, yes . . . there…
Our, and my youngest child, Kaitlyn Arquette, was chased down in her car and shot to death in Albuquerque, New Mexico while driving home from dinner with a girlfriend. I have little memory of the first days after the shooting,…
From the moment we found out you were coming into our lives, we felt electric: a mix of excitement, adrenaline, and a dose of fear for good measure. We dutifully began plotting the course of our lives together – starting…
Nobody expects to raise their grandkids, but thousands of Americans are doing just that. I’m one of them. On a snowy February night in 2007, my daughter died from the injuries she received in a car crash. In the fall,…
A few years ago, I ended up at the American Folk Art Museum quite by accident. A friend was visiting from out of town, and we’d intended to go to the newly opened MOMA. But the lines were insane. Next…
I had a vivid dream shortly after Mack, our son, died. I walked into our house through the front door and immediately recognized that we had been robbed. I made my way tentatively through each familiar room surveying overturned furniture,…
First, let me make a statement: anything positive or any gift we may receive as a result of our child/children’s death we would gladly give back, if only we could have them back with us again. Since that isn’t possible, then…