On April 1, my daughter Maya went skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She was 19, home on spring break from community college. She went to a resort outside of Truckee with her friends for a day of fun. It was 1992. When she arrived home early that evening, I had...
I've discovered that love trumps grief. Today is the anniversary of my daughter Maya's death 31 years ago. What sustains me in moments of grief is “love in the trenches,” the kind that demands fortitude and commitment – not the easy breezy romantic ideal. Just as the...
Readers of my memoir, Swimming with Maya, often approach and say something like, “After reading your story, I feel as if I know you as an intimate friend. Wasn’t it hard to be so open about your life?” Now, I find myself tested again as I put my marriage under the...
What I know is that love overcomes grief. It will be 30 years since my daughter Maya was declared brain dead on April 6, 1992. She was only 19 then. This is the year she would have turned 50. How mind blowing is that? What keeps me going is “love in the trenches,” the...
Grief shows its face with fierce waves of emotion that sweep us away as well as gentle memories we can linger over. In our year of lockdown and loss, I’ve experienced all the faces of grief from the benevolent to the malign, from deep gratitude to profound rage. What...
Last month I celebrated five years of retirement from corporate editing. It seems like a lifetime ago – I don’t live where I used to, or think like I used to, or do what I used to. And the world has shifted radically in five years. Everything looks different now. Work...
“Don’t worry about anything – or anyone,” my grandmother said, and thumped her cane emphatically, underlining her words. She was speaking from the “other side,” a world where I could not hear her directly, but a gifted psychic could translate her words to me. I don’t...
Maya began drinking young - she was binge drinking by the age of 15 at weekend house parties in Walnut Creek. I was a young, naive, overstretched single mom with no concept of the party culture in the wealthy suburbs of Contra Costa County where we lived in the late...
On this day 46 years ago I gave birth to a baby girl. We named her Maya. She arrived three weeks early so she was was tiny, just 5 lbs. 4 oz. For the rest of her life, Maya was in a hurry. Friends called her "Barbie" because of her white-blonde hair. She had dark...
It’s a day to celebrate, and to mourn. Maya died on April 6, 1992, twenty-six years ago. And on this day, my dear friend Patti Frame received my daughter’s liver, and her life began again. Others received the gift of sight, or a new heart, or a new kidney. And many...