Solo

Two years after becoming suddenly and unexpectedly widowed, one dog dead now too, my daughter 18 and about to leave home, I’ve closed the Ericka Inn, I’ve changed the rules.…

I’ve been thinking about life after death. I’m not a believer, and I was raised without the idea of an Afterlife. But if there was one, my perfect Afterlife would…

It’s January 2000, and Bill, Annie, and I are on an island in Thailand, at the very spot where, almost five years from now, a tsunami will engulf and destroy…

A couple of years ago in Oaxaca, Mexico, I met a widow in her mid-seventies who was traveling the world with her husband’s ashes, leaving bits of them in all…

I sit in my garden. It’s late spring, and here in Northern California the baby roses are still in bloom but so is the lavender. My daughter Annie is off…

Traveling alone for the first time since Bill died, I arrive in Budapest, Hungary to teach a one-week seminar at the technical university. I’d planned to fly to Paris after…

You never expect it to happen. People say this as cameras zoom into their shocked faces: “In an instant, my life changed.” The earthquake, the car accident, the drive-by, the…