Sublime

‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’

Today, most of us lack the direct experience of being witness to a meaningful and family-centered dying process. We have outsourced the washing, dressing, and burial of the body of our beloved. Furthermore, just as grief is too often viewed as an illness to overcome, death, too, is seen as something to “fight.”

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pre

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned