My family is big on the Chris names. We have Aunt Chris, Christopher and Chrissie (my older sister), and if Lucy had been a boy, she would have been named Christian! Chrissie has played with her [...]

I haven’t quite finished with all the stories about my family and Mom’s death. A friend of mine – Karen Brandow – also lost her mother recently. In the eulogy, she [...]

And here’s the man himself, with Pinky again. I don’t know how or why we got so lucky. Avinash is truly one of the best photographers in India and he acts like it is a privilege to [...]

Being at home with Dad this month has meant many trips down memory lane – some metaphorical, some actual. We went to Fall River several times – where both of us were born, though he [...]

Mary seems to defy nature – she grows more beautiful every time I see her. At Mom’s funeral, her eyes shone with tears and with love and all of us felt so lucky that she had been [...]

I have already written about all that Lucy did for Mom while she was alive. Here’s what a friend of hers told her about what Mom is going to do for her: Lucy, I was very sorry to hear about [...]

My friend Imrana called from Delhi to say how sorry she was about Mom. During the conversation, she asked me to put a flower on her grave from her. I told her we weren’t doing flowers. That [...]

What a final thing the funeral is. We can no longer avoid the stark reality of death, the glaring fact that the person who was once our life, our sweetness and our hope, is no longer among us. [...]

Wakes are hard. There is the person you love so much, lying in a coffin, and here is this whole line of people filing by solemnly, tears in their eyes, groping for the right words to say, wishing [...]

My cousin Jay is one of my favorite people, and in spite of our meeting only once in ten years, we have a deep connection. He is a Little Brother of Charles de Foucauld, an order whose members [...]