And Maybe Mercy

On the table in my study I’ve propped a photo I recently found of my mother next to one of my younger son. Her hair is dyed black, but is nevertheless tinged with silver around her face, and has been set in the style of the times: with curlers and a teasing comb and shellac…

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“Anne Sexton & Her Kind” … One More Time

Music. Music. Music. How my mother loved music of all sorts—even though she couldn’t carry a tune and never played an instrument. Can such a love run in families? Perhaps so, as I sang in three high school choirs and participated in “summer stock” musical comedies where singing was de rigueur. I began with the…

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Closer to Shore

I rode the wave, rising toward its rolling crest, and then dropped down into a gulf of pain. I was thirty-one years old, and it was a pivotal date for me: October 4, 1984. The day has just passed again in 2021, but that October Friday so long ago remains sharp in my memory—as sharp…

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Giving Away Mom

My mother’s name invades my writing room: the big, black, bold ANNE SEXTON jumping off the spine of Self-Portrait In Letters, a volume I edited when I was twenty-one, immediately after her suicide. Arranged on four of my many shelves are several rows of her books, both in English and in foreign translation, neither alphabetized…

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Autumn’s Light

Autumn came bright and early that year. My toddler and I wandered down the sidewalk over a carpet of leaves, one that created a riot of color crackling under our feet. I held his hand as he balanced himself, precariously, on a low stone wall. Periodically pain streaked, low and mean, through my belly. For…

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Waterfalls of the Sun

I haven’t been a devotee of poetry for over forty-five years now. My mother’s death did me in as a reader and writer of this often-enigmatic genre, making it impossible for me to enjoy the short mysterious lines studded with similes and its exacting attention to language. Poetry became too painful; too much of a…

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Waking Up To Suicide

Did you know that September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month? This recognition of suicide in our society is now highlighted every year at this time. Many federal departments, national foundations, and small support groups are attempting to increase public awareness about our country’s plague of self-inflicted death–its precursors, warning signs, and possible interventions. This…

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Magical Scraps Of Inspiration

“What do you think about this?” my mother asks, handing over a sheet of manila paper, its lines of type covered with the markings of a black, felt-tip pen. “I rewrote it again this morning.” I’ve just come home from junior high school and we’re sitting her study. She’s been working on this poem all…

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Letting The Love In

Mother’s Day is only four days away now. This particular holiday always makes me a little bit sad. I remember my mother and wonder how we would have celebrated it this coming Sunday, when she would have been eighty-eight and I am just rounding the corner into sixty-three. My mother never saw her twenty-first Mother’s…

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