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“I’ve got a marked propensity towards procrastination,” I boasted, proud to be something other than irritating to our Berea college girl Wilda. Governesses once cared for families in the waterfront neighborhood my parents moved us into after my father started designing shopping malls. The few black housekeepers remaining, who’d raised the privileged kids from earlier…

Not knowing what else to do in the final hours of my mother’s life, I fired up karaoke and Dave and I sang “If Momma was Married,” from the musical “Gypsy.” Explaining it was one of her favorite songs, I asked a nurse’s aide to shoot a video for posterity. I’d shot one of my…

Not knowing what else to do in the final hours of my mother’s life, I fired up karaoke and Dave and I sang “If Momma was Married,” from the musical “Gypsy.” Explaining it was one of her favorite songs, I asked a nurse’s aide to shoot a video for posterity. I’d shot one of my…

When I was two, a cop found me and my friend Timmy asleep in a storm drain in the woods behind our house. Connecticut state police searched for hours and were preparing to drag a nearby river when one of them located us curled up together. “Oblivious,” my mother called our napping through the shouting…

I loved April the minute I saw her, beginning with her name. I mouthed it too myself watching the tanned, part primate, part I-didn’t-know-what with a brown pixie-cut in a crepe-checkered sundress sip on a flower. Her steamy June lawn wafted with honeysuckle as immediately after introducing herself, she bit off a blossom end and…

I first heard my father had a girlfriend from my mother who spilled the beans while they perused retirement village catalogues. Trying to address lifestyle changes that his failing health imposed, they’d visited a few places when I heard my mother ask what kind of community he’d have chosen for him and “Lela” to live…

After discussing suicide with my mother throughout her life, I was surprised she waited ‘til her mid-nineties to lunge headfirst from her wheelchair. Though a lifelong depressive irritated by everything, I thought my mother was too spineless to do it ‘til she did.  Though she never sought therapy, she discussed killing herself like others did…

After discussing suicide with my mother throughout her life, I was surprised she waited ‘til her mid-nineties to drop headfirst from her wheelchair. Though a lifelong depressive irritated by everything, I thought my mother was too spineless to do it ‘til she did. Though she never sought therapy, she discussed killing herself like others did…

So what does “Aging Gracefully” mean if anything at all? Does it mean keeping a low profile as we decline into the “hoary age” so as not to trouble juveniles with the inevitability of doom or is it about etiquette or maintaining a dancer’s physique? Why even consider a dignified decline? Who benefits if we…

“How is it possible for today to be so much better than yesterday,” I wondered this morning delivering Agave pups from my front yard to my elderly neighbor.  When we first moved to Florida, Sally appeared ancient on the other side of our shared fence. Now in her mid-seventies, “she looks younger than me,” I…