Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays

have no memory of my grandparents in conversation or of them touching each other.

Few of us are free of the feeling that death, that most ordinary of all ordinary facts about human existence, is also unutterably strange.

Years after my father died, my mother told me that his habit of interrupting her when she spoke had hurt and angered her. When she confronted him about it, he was hurt and angry.

No human culture discards its dead without ceremony. To leave the dead without rites is ignominy. It seems that even the Neanderthals buried their dead.

self-sacrificing, patient queen of the domestic realm, who assumed the moral education of her children, was born in the eighteenth century. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau deserves considerable credit for her creation.

there is a detached quality to the eulogy, as if he is surveying his childhood from a great distance, and his link to the woman who bore and suckled and cared for him is missing.

hunting-gathering people, but they engaged in elaborate rituals and embalming practices. This came as a great surprise to anthropologists because they did not expect such sophistication from hunter-gatherers. Their afterlife was given far more attention than their before-life.

Their many sanctions and threats of punishment were directed only at their own four children, but when I was in earshot of the authoritarian directives, I would feel my limbs turn rigid and my heart speed up in vicarious alarm.

that is how the city was born: necropolis before metropolis.