Gracie

The organ pipes exhaled the muffled tones of “Be Not Afraid,” and Natalie Keene’s family, until then crying, and hugging, and fussing near the door like one massive failing heart, filed tightly together. Only two men were needed to carry the shiny white coffin. Any more and they would have been bumping into each other.

I stare intensely at their hands as they shake mine. Their skin is wrinkled, transparent, and spotty. I think about how their hands were once baby hands. I think about babies gripping adults’ fingers. I think about how these people have probably had their own babies and held them with the same hands.

It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.

We’d not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, nor gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we’d not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we’d been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.

My main access to the esteem of my peers—who were, with few exceptions, mostly young, white, able-bodied men with family money—was in how little I had despite how hard I worked. This, plus my disability, plus motherhood, bathed me in a tragic light, which, if I stepped into it just right, lit me up with the look of moral superiority. I could wield

Don't feel bad for how you have or are approaching your struggles. It's okay. Take care of yourself in these moments. There, in your own quiet place of love and acceptance you will find what life is trying to tell you. Because there is a message in your hardship. That inherently houses the way out of it.”

I read the book too, and liked how the monster learned language from the boy Felix, and remembered with great clarity a moment in the book when the monster explained that he can hardly describe the effect reading certain books was having on him. I felt that way too about reading, how quiet a behavior it was, and how quiet I had become, how that

Underneath fear and his instinct to escape, my father experienced, he told me, a rush of love for my mother that made him feel ill, lost to the depths of a new knowledge: that love and fear got all tangled up,

The mass media dwells on and perpetuates an ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love.