My Last Name
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Read between May 28 - June 1, 2022
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There is nothing natural about being ninety-five years old, being dressed by a young woman in pink pajamas, being unable to forget the things you never wanted to remember, and unable to remember the only things you ever wanted to keep. No, there is nothing natural about death or its causes—this too, I remember.
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My mother often said that all a man has in this world—the only thing he’s born with, and the only thing he can take to the grave—is the dignity of being a human being. That is how she treated our father—with the dignity of being human. Even when she had to intervene to protect her children—for we too, she insisted, were human beings—she treated him as a man and not a monster.
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There is an oldness—and not a good oldness—that settles on a person, even a young person, when they have walked through seasons of grief and disappointment. There is a seriousness that settles on a person when they have felt the weight of loss and responsibility and worry. I felt that weight with John’s death, and I still felt that weight thinking of Jack’s future. I had become an old woman at the age of twenty-eight. But there is also a youth that returns as one grows older. After you’ve lived long enough in this broken-down old world, and seen the vanity
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of striving after the wind and felt the sting of the thorn and the thistle, you learn that, as the Preacher says, “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour.” That is what Everett had become—a young man again, a man who knew how to eat and drink and enjoy good. Everett had aged well through his losses, and passed through old age, and regained a youthfulness that only seemed to grow. So he was young enough to marry an old woman like me. That is why our marriage worked: he could lead me through what another, ...more
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There is my body, like a Sunday dress laid out in the evening after I have worn it and am preparing to put it away.