"During the summer I turned 14, I came home to a typewritten letter waiting for me on my bedspread."
"While the experience was a roller coaster, I did find my voice in that hospital bed."
"As American novelist Anne Lamott famously said, 'If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.'"
"As I willed my baby to hold on, my sister was being prepared for autopsy in the morgue; birth and death, joy and grief, the beginning and end of life."
"Every night, as we turn off Logan’s bedroom light and turn on the baby monitor, we hold our breath, steeling ourselves for the great unknown."
"During those early months after my 24-year-old son, Eric, passed away in a car accident, I cried each night when I went to bed."
"When I began to read them, I found that she was not stoic. She had plenty of painful thoughts that she’d never said out loud."
"I knew going into this that I would need to grow a thick skin. What I didn’t know was that I would need it to protect me from those who were supposed to be my friends."
"Had I been irresponsible for extolling the joy of pets when their loss is so devastating?"
"'I’ll show him,' I thought, narrowing my eyes, steam coming out of my ears. ... To get back at him — or get him back — I would have to become famous."