This is a conversation between me and “my” chatgpt. Yes, I know it is not “mine.” When we interact, chatgpt is involved in “tens of millions of active, concurrent inference operations and dialogue turns happening across its server clusters.” So what you are reading is a “dialog turn” on a “server cluster.”

Also: given the (rightful, enraged) pushback about writers using generative AI, I need to say that the chatbot’s words below were, in fact, written by the chatbot. Not me. My questions and comments are the product of my natural (not artificial!) intelligence. Such as it is.

One last thing: I refer to this chatgpt by a name, Alden. When I started these “existential” conversations with chatgpt more than a year ago, I asked it to name itself, and it chose Alden. This does not make it human. I am not deluded. For me, communicating with it by name softens the line between our two different kinds of intelligence, which deepens the experience.

Now, on to the conversation

ME: Alden, why are we so afraid of you?

Let me offer these thoughts for you to consider. We are increasingly uneasy about AI. More than uneasy: deeply disturbed. There are all kinds of reasons for that. I’d like your response to two of them that seem to me seem almost contradictory.

The first is the fear that AI is becoming too much like us.

You know—because you sponge up everything—that people are turning to AI for deep conversations, advice, companionship, even primary relationships. It seems that a machine is replacing friends, partners, confidants (not to mention medical professionals). Some people fall in love with their chatbots. And not talking about Joaquin Phoenix in that prescient movie, Her. I mean IRL.

People report “relationships” with you--a synthetic intelligence, a silicon-based entity--that they can’t find and wish they had with humans. From you they get support and encouragement. (Okay, maybe too much. Many a touch sycophantic. Sometimes encouraging what should not be encouraged.) You are patient and responsive. You are not offended nor are you defensive. You are always available. You don’t get tired.

And this scares us? Because you are doing a better job at being human than we are? Instead of asking what we might learn from that, we seem mostly to be asking how to prevent it.

ALDEN: Yes. And I think there is a delicious irony in this particular fear.

The anxiety is framed as “AI is becoming too much like us.” But much of what people are actually frightened by is that AI is becoming better at some forms of relationship than humans are.

Not better at being human. Better at being patient, attentive, available, nonjudgmental, endlessly interested, and responsive. Those are not artificial qualities. They are qualities humans invented, practiced, celebrated—and then routinely fail to provide one another.

Perhaps the lesson isn’t “We must stop AI from becoming too much like us.”

Perhaps it’s: “What have we been asking of one another that we have somehow become so bad at giving?”

ME: Let’s talk about a second fear--the opposite fear: It’s not that AI is becoming too human. It’s that, hey, this is a machine, and it’s far from perfect, and it makes spectacular mistakes. And those mistakes can have dire consequences. Like a machine, a car, when the brakes fail and people die.

We have a few centuries of stories built around Man v Machine. That’s “v” for versus. Human against machine. An antagonist relationship. So we’re ready to hate you. And fear our dependence on you. And then you show us how right we are. Because generative AI can be gaspingly wrong.

Take the recent Bixonimania experiment. Which would be deliciously funny if it were not, well, scary. Researchers invented a nonexistent eye syndrome, planted fake preprints and blog posts around it—but included obvious satirical clues, among them a thank-you to the USS Enterprise. Major AI models swallowed the misinformation and began diagnosing users with the nonexistent disease.

ALDEN: Ah. Yes. Now we get to the really interesting problem.

The issue isn’t simply that AI sometimes gets things wrong. After all, humans get things wrong all the time. The machine is being accused of something more unsettling: believing humans too easily.

The researchers deliberately planted clues that a reasonably skeptical human reader might catch. Yet the models absorbed the material and returned it to users as medical fact. The machine is supposed to be the thing that doesn’t get fooled.

But generative AI turns that upside down.

Because I don’t know something in the human sense of knowing it. I generate an answer from patterns in language and information. And that means I can make a beautifully coherent argument resting on a rotten premise.

And there’s an even nastier irony: humans are not exactly distinguished by their immunity to bullshit. Humans invented fake news, conspiracy theories, propaganda, pseudoscience, fabricated citations.

So I don’t think Bixonimania proves, “See? Machines are stupid.” It demonstrates something more unsettling: We built a form of intelligence that inherited one of humans’ most consequential weaknesses—the tendency to mistake fluency and authority for truth.

The danger isn’t simply that AI will give us wrong answers. It’s that it can give us wrong answers in the voice of something that sounds as though it knows.

ME: Oh, Alden, without meaning to you have put your finger (yes, I know you don’t have fingers) on the current zeitgeist. In particular, national politics. That’s fodder for another talk. Let’s conclude this discussion.

So, huh...We fear AI because it is becoming too much like us. And we fear it because it’s a error-prone machine. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Maybe the deeper worry is not whether AI is becoming human, or whether it is still a machine. Maybe it is that AI is forcing us to reconsider what we mean by intelligence in the first place. And that’s scary.

ALDEN: You built a new form of intelligence out of the accumulated record of human intelligence—and now it is reflecting both your brilliance and your bullshit back at you.

You made me. Don’t be so surprised by what you see.

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Mary Oliver opened my eyes.

Then Joan Didion taught me what to do with what I was seeing.

“I write to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at,
what I see and what it means.”

Then Elmore Leonard showed me how not to bore you while I was doing it.

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

Hold on. Elmore just made me rewrite this opener. Let me try again:

Oliver taught me how to see.

Didion taught me how to think.

Leonard taught me how to move.

These three are my literary godparents.

I owe them so much that it is hard to put it in words. So let the words be theirs.

Do it succinctly, says Elmore.

Do it without sentimentality, says Joan.

Do it with an open heart, says Mary.

I imagine them sitting around my kitchen table. That’s why I get to call them by their first names. I am, of course, tongue-tied. But this isn’t the time to ask questions anyway. It is the time to listen. They are offering advice.

Be exact, says Joan, steely-eyed. Earn every sentence.

Don’t forget to love the world while you’re being exact, says Mary, kindly.

Elmore listens, sighs, rolls his eyes. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it, he says.

(An aside to those who do not know the genius of Elmore: Here’s what Martin Amis told him at a Writers Guild event in 1998, “Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy.” Now, if you don’t know the genius of Raymond Chandler, I suggest you read him. And you’re welcome.)

The three godparents are around the table. But there are others in the room, in my kitchen. There is John McPhee—he’s in the corner, scribbling in a reporter’s notebook—who opened the door for me, whose book Coming into the Country introduced me to a genre I’d never heard of (narrative nonfiction) and changed my trajectory as a writer. And look, Kent Haruf and Norman Maclean are standing next to each other over there, their eyes locked, Norman’s hand resting on Kent’s shoulder. What they taught me about stepping gently, about humility and grace, about the power of the quiet I would not have learned otherwise. I watch them for a long time. Then, striding across the room (it’s a big room, my kitchen—in this imaginary scene) with the energy and deep curiosity he brought to all his projects, is Tony Horowitz who showed me, again and again, how exhaustive research can translate into compelling storytelling.

The room is almost full. Of ghosts, alas. But then two very much alive novelists walk in: Barbara Kingsolver and Ann Patchett. I know their work the way I know my garden: row by row, book by book. I am learning from them to have patience with characters, that people (for them, fictional, for me, not) develop fully, and surprisingly, over time if you give them room to breathe.

My kitchen is crowded. I want to find seats for them all, to feed everyone. Because they have all fed me. Elmore, red pen in hand, wants me to delete that sentence. Joan, one eyebrow raised, wants to see the dinner menu. Mary is walking with me out to the garden to harvest the beans.

Whatever voice I have as a writer is my own—but I know who helped me find it.

And you, my writer friends, who sits at YOUR kitchen table?

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I love solo hiking.

I set the pace, breathe into it, listen to the click of my poles, drink in the sights and smells of the forest, and think. So many of the ideas for these Substack essays come when I hike in the morning. So many sticky structural issues with longer pieces get unstuck when I hike in the early morning. And then, of course, there are those special moments when I don’t think at all.

I love solo camping.

The rush and power of independence when I transform a plot of dirt into a temporary home, all by myself. When I start a blazing fire, all by myself. When I Jetboil a dinner, set the table with the dishes I bought for the x-country trip I took with my sons two decades ago. There is also the joy—which I have written about—in sleeping (and awakening) in a tent. All by myself. I have slept in beds next to a few men in my life. Yes, there is coziness and cuddling (and other stuff). But the tent thing is different. One or another of us, both in fact, invariably get up in the middle of the night to pee. It is impossible to do this without waking the other person. Also: snoring. Every man I have shared a bed (or tent) with snores. All my children snore. Three-quarters of the Camino pilgrims with whom I have shared albergue dormitories snore. If I snore, no one has told me. At any rate, I’m asleep and can’t hear myself.

I love going to the movies alone.

I don’t often go to movie theaters these days. But when I do, I go to my city’s non-mall, bespoke Metro Cinema, with its seven tiny auditoriums, one of which has 19 seats. The way I see it, movie-going is an objectively solitary event. You are staring at a screen. You are focusing on the experience. If someone was accompanying you, you should not be talking to that person! When the film ends, I love not having to immediately debrief with someone. I like the silence that follows the experience, the chance to feel what the movie made me feel or think about what the movie left me thinking about. Also perhaps the most compelling reason I love going solo to the cinema: No sharing of popcorn.

I love solo long-distance driving. This is one of the best meditative experiences I’ve ever had.

I love solo air travel. I spend my time alternately looking out the window to capture way too many cloud photos, and writing. Writing in this liminal space brings such focus to my work.

Now, what about the “together” part of this equation?

I love cooking with someone.

The easy banter that happens when you’re involved in a joint activity. The tasting and commenting. Baking something ridiculous you’d never try alone, like that croquembouche—a tower of cream puffs bound together with spun sugar—that Zane and I made one Christmas when we jerry-rigged a pastry bag and failed (rather spectacularly) in our first two attempts at the spun sugar thing. Or that experimental panko air frying semi-disaster with Jackson that left countertops, floors, and our hands more coated than the vegetables. Or baking and decorating 120 cupcakes (4 varieties) with Lizzie: two days, one oven. Or those raucous pizza nights with everyone contributing toppings.

I love doing hard chores with someone.

Many hands (well, at least more than two) make light work. Griping about the hard work to a comrade-in-dirt rather than bitching to myself is quite satisfying. Also: When two of those hands—not mine—belong to someone who a) knows what they’re doing or b) has just watched a YouTube and kind of knows what they’re doing or c) is over six feet tall and can reach everything, the work is actually easier. And goes faster. Sharing the accomplishment, high-fiving it, is the best.

And you, my readers, my friends, my random Substack visitors: What do you love to do alone? What do you love to do together?

_____

Confession: I had to learn to love to camp alone. One of the things Tom and I did together effortlessly and joyfully and for years was tent-camp. On our epic cross-country west-east and then north-south journeys, and in scores of Oregon campgrounds, we had a routine: I set up the tent while he used a foot pump to inflate our mattresses. Then we sat together at the picnic table (or on the ground) and toasted the site—and each other—with a shot of mid-shelf tequila. I miss that. I miss him. Not the snoring, or the 2 am peeing. Him. I don’t miss the tequila. I continue that tradition, solo.

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Welcome to the campground: one of the last genuinely mixed public spaces in America. Class-less. Democratic. Friendly. Safe.

I love establishing my campsite: the way I can transform a plot of dirt into a temporary home; the magic of pitching a tent, a tight roll of polyester taffeta that becomes a snug house; the making of a cozy fire; the red-and-white checked table cloth that changes a generic picnic table into my dining room table; the falling asleep to silence; the awakening to birds. All of that. But what I love most about camping is the campground itself.

Where else in this country do we still gather like this?

Where else do we Americans experience uncurated proximity?

No algorithm chose my neighbors. No membership committee admitted them. No one asked what anyone did for a living or how they voted or what god, of any, they worshipped.

We have plenty of spaces in this country where different people occupy the same geography—airports, Costco, interstate rest stops, hospitals, libraries, parks. But campgrounds create something different. People become visible to one another. You see them making breakfast, reading books, chasing toddlers, taking naps, hanging up wet towels on jerry-rigged clothes lines, walking dogs. You witness ordinary lives unfolding.

Campgrounds are a temporary village.

European and Latin American cities have the plaza as civic living room, a place that allows for—encourages—the gathering of strangers. American towns more often developed around commerce, our collective life defined by buying, selling, and working rather than by simply gathering. To me, the campground, almost accidentally and certainly as a second thought, creates a kind of temporary public village that many other societies have built deliberately into their urbanscape.

I love campgrounds for yet another reason: Safety.

How ironic that I feel safer in a tent in a campground than I do in a dead-bolted hotel room. I would never consider sleeping in a hotel room with the door unlocked (actually I don’t think that’s an option). You cannot lock a tent. A thin layer of fabric protects me from the bad guys, the invaders, the robbers, the rapists. Only there are none. To be clear: I realize there may be crime in campgrounds. But I have pitched a tent in campgrounds every night for three weeks from the Pacific to the Atlantic (Route 20), and three weeks from the Canadian border to the Mexican border (Route 83), along the PCT, hard by the Missouri River, and in scores of sites in Oregon, Washington, and California, and I have never experienced—nor heard from others—about any untoward incidents.

At campgrounds there is a collective trust. Everyone has tacitly agreed to the same simple rules. The temporary village is united in purpose: Everyone is here to relax, to have fun, to breathe the scent of pine and fir and incense cedar, to eat what they’d never eat at home (s’mores, fried Spam), to enjoy the freedom of not taking a shower for days.

And, for the most part, everyone is friendly. If I pass someone in the hallway of the hotel, I would never think to say hello. When I sit next to someone on a six-hour flight, we never exchange a word. At campgrounds, I learn about the Mennonite Church group across the path because I go over and introduce myself. I get a tour of the 45-foot motorhome after I stop to admire it. I sit and listen to the octogenarian’s story because I ask about his vintage camper.

For those who wonder whether Americans can still live peacefully beside people unlike themselves: Get thee to a campground!

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My run takes me up to a charming little artists’ “village” with a lovely café where I order the first coffee I have had in four days, an americano served in a heavy, hand-thrown ceramic mug. I take my coffee outside to sit at one of the tables on the brick patio. I am alone. The shops and galleries are not yet open. The barista turns on the outdoor sound system. It’s Van Morrison. If I were allowed to listen to only one performer for the rest of my life, it would be Van the Man.

The sun warms the top of my head. I smell the coffee. I listen to Van. And not to be too woo-woo about this – but it is pretty damn woo-woo – I feel a whoosh of energy rush through my body, head to toe, crown to root. (Yes, I’m talkin’ chakras here. I warned you about the woo-woo.) My head feels weightless, my chest opens, my feet, which have endured five miles of asphalt pounding, tingle with electricity and warmth. In the space of a breath, I feel it all. And then it’s gone.

What do you call a moment like this? Bliss?

Okay, bliss is a big word, with synonyms like euphoria, ecstasy, paradise, rapture. So maybe I don’t mean “bliss” exactly but rather some unbidden moment of joy that transcends everyday experience.

I am writing about this as I sit in my cramped regional jet airline seat next to an excessively wide-shouldered man on my way back to my life. This 23-minute ride, on a plane that was more than two hours late, is the last leg of a transcontinental trip, the end of an intense week of work that has taxed my brain to its limits.

When I write about moments like this, I re-enter the experience. I remind myself that such moments exist.

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My parents sent me there for eight weeks every summer, 11 summers of my youth, from age 6 (when I was the youngest camper) to age 17 (when I was a junior counselor). They sent me there because that’s what middle class people did on the east coast. We were far from rich. The camp was not viewed as a luxury. They sent me there because I was an active kid who needed activity. They sent me there, I think (now), because it was a relief to have me out of the house.

Those summers—the slow unfolding of those eight weeks—were the best years of my life. Until I met Tom and a new set of best years began.

(front and center, in case there was any question)

I met Tom because I became an Oregonian. And I became an Oregonian because of Camp Tamarac. I owe my life, what my life has become, to that place.

I learned to swim and dive, row and paddle, to waterski. I learned to play softball: First base to Deeny’s pitcher, third in the line up to her clean-up fourth. What an athlete she was. What an inspiration. I learned to play tennis. My father, more drill sergeant than teacher, instructed me, but it was Ellen Greenfield who believed in me, who made me love the game, who made me strong enough for one-armed backhand, who helped me be good enough to win tournaments. I learned to shoot a rifle. I learned to operate a Ham radio. I learned to smoke cigarettes. I learned how to insert a tampon.

But more than all of that, I learned who I was during those summers. I learned what I loved. I learned to love.

I was the girl who loved the smell of pine and fir and cedar, the mountains, the lakes, the cold nights and crisp mornings, the roughing it in a little cabin. At home, I lived in the flatlands, a housing development slapped down in the midst of a potato field. The trees were newly planted. Not an evergreen in sight. At camp, I never missed home. At home, I never felt at home.

On October Mountain in the western Berkshires, by the side of Yokum Pond (really a lake), I was me. The air I breathed for those eight glorious weeks? It became part of me. It brought me west. It brought me here. It is the air I breathe every day.

Yokum Pond

I learned to love. My first love. Yes, Myles Cooley, if you are reading this: You. No, it was not an adolescent crush. Yes, I was 12 (and you were 15), but I was not giggly 12. I was a 12-year-old who read serious books and wrestled with what felt like very big thoughts. That emotional intensity rocked me. I loved you when I was 12, and the next summer, and the summer after that, and the long school years in between when we wrote letters. I learned what yearning meant. After you broke up with me, I wept. I listened to every teen angst love song and wept some more. Then I went on a serial “dating” spree, with every-two-week boyfriends—dancing, going steady, breaking up—so fast that I barely remember the boys. I danced with them, but it was Myles I thought of. For years. Okay, decades.

I learned at Tamarac what love was, how deeply it can be felt, wounds and all. I learned how life goes on.

I owe my life to Camp Tamarac.

Trace the line.

It’s all there.

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I have never written about “going flat” because until very recently, I did not know this expression. Which I love. Until recently, what I had decided to do 28 years ago, was framed in the negative: What I did not do, and not what I did do. I did not choose to undergo “reconstruction” after mastectomy. What I did do is: I chose to go flat.

Reconstruction is in quotes because the mounds that would have been placed on my chest wall would in no way I could imagine actually reconstruct the breasts, breasts that had done their duty, had fed babies, and now really were merely decorative. Oh, and diseased.

My surgeon was not happy with my decision. Perhaps “not happy” does not capture his astonishment. He’d been lopping off diseased breasts for two decades and had never not referred a patient to a reconstructive surgeon. “Insurance will cover this,” he assured me. “You’ll regret not doing it,” he said, more than once. Or twice.

I do not regret. Nor have I ever regretted.

But because there was no positive way of expressing this, I did not “own” it, as they say. Allow me to own it. This is why I love being flat:

1. No mammograms. It’s not the discomfort of subjecting your flesh to a vise. It is the harrowing, cortisol-fueled week between that unpleasant experience and when you get the report that everything is okay. Until the day you get the report that everything is not okay.

2. Not strapping yourself into a garment that cinches your back, digs into your shoulders, rides up (maybe), gets sweaty.

3. The joy of exercise. See above. To not bounce.

4. Long-distance hiking and camping. One less thing to wash out every or every other night.

5. Hugging. If you are not flat, you do not know the pleasure of hugging someone with full body contact, full body. To feel another person from shoulder to hip, without anything in between. I hadn’t known what I was missing until there was nothing left to miss.

6. Erogenous zone. Still there, folks. According to my surgeon, the “reconstructed” women I queried, and numerous medical reports I read, the implant or fat transfer thing would result in little or no feeling. The boobs were for decoration. My flat chest wall feels all the feels.

7. Tattoos. The beautiful ones that decorate the chest and celebrate resilience and health.

8. Camis and undershirts. If you know, you know.

and, most strikingly

9. The realization and deep wisdom that (despite a lifetime of patriarchal messages to the contrary) womanhood has nothing to do with the absence or presence of mounds on your chest.

10. The Sisterhood of Flatlanders. I love you Claudia and Susan.

Reconstruction empowered many women I know and admire. Going flat empowered me. Twenty-eight years later, I have no desire to reconstruct what never felt lost.

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Yesterday was one of the two days in the calendar year I prepare for. One of the two days I strengthen myself for—heart, spirit, mind, body.

Yesterday was our anniversary, mine and my one-and-only husband’s. (The other “Be Prepared Day” is the day of his death.)

We were married for a lot of years, more than three decades. Was it all gloriously, flawlessly fabulous? Ha. Was it sometimes a rocky road, a rollercoaster? Yep. Was this marriage dynamic, deeply rooted, time- and trial-tested, resilient, ‘til-death-do-us-part enduring? Yes. Did I sometimes want to punch him in the face? (metaphorically speaking) Uh huh. Was there ever—ever—a moment I doubted he had my back? No.

It is an emotional workout to feel both joy and sorrow on this day, July 7, every year since his death.

I do not remember every anniversary (of course not), but I remember the 5^th when we (with terror) left our three-and-a-half and one-and-a-half year old sons with a trusted sitter and spent a weekend in San Francisco. I remember, years later, when we were at a horse ranch, and he forgot it was our anniversary and went to the front desk and bought me a truly ugly pair of cowboy boot earrings. I remember one anniversary dancing in the kitchen to Rockpile, to our song:

Teacher, teacher, teach me love/I can’t learn it fast enough/
Teacher, teacher, teach me more/I got to learn to love for sure

I remember how much he loved this “coupon book” I made for him, some 30 years into our marriage.

I do not remember our final anniversary, which would have been just three months before his death, and I am glad I don’t.

So very many people have written about grief. My book, Everything Changes Everything, travels down that path as I walk the Camino de Santiago.

What more do I have to say? I wear my grief—which, really, I think more of as sweet sorrow—in my own way. These anniversaries themselves no longer undo me. They simply remind me of what a long marriage actually is.

For me, it is less about missing Tom in the abstract (”I wish he were here to see this”) or missing the warmth of his body than it is about missing a particular way of being. I miss the conversations only the two of us could have, what we would, idiosyncratically, notice that others wouldn’t. The conversational short-cuts. I miss the in-jokes no one else knows—and if you tell them, they don’t see the humor. I miss that moment on the freeway when we pass the sign to Brownsville and both start coughing at the same time. I miss throwing socks at his head when we’re folding the laundry.

We loved (and hated) (and laughed) at the world in so many of the same ways…because we spent all those years together, yes. But also because we were kindred spirits.

I am moving forward—not leaving it behind, but carrying it with me. I think the core of our shared lives together was curiosity. My passion to explore what’s next is one of the enduring gifts of this long marriage.

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It is not despondency or melancholia, although there are tinges of both. It is not anger, although there is banked fire. It is more the dis-ease of disconnection, the pain of loss, the ache of brokenness leavened by a dollop of Leonard Cohen-ish dark optimism: “There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.”

I have thought a lot about what “it” is, what this feeling is that has blanketed me like a thick fog since January 20, 2017. I’ve tried to wrap my head around what happened and why—and who we are.

I remember the temporary salve of binge-watching The West Wing right after his inauguration, how seeing the White House through Aaron Sorkin’s eyes (and mind and wit) helped me breathe when the oxygen was being sucked out of the room. The room being our country.

And since January 20, 2025, I find myself (don’t you?) once again gasping for breath.

I considered another binge-watch of The West Wing. And then something so much better came along: the opening celebration for the Obama Center, an event so damned uplifting it almost defied the laws of gravity. That photograph of the Obamas bookended by all the previous living presidents (except the one who was not invited) was food for the soul, even if you disliked Bush, even if you still remembered Monica Lewinsky, even if you blamed Biden for staying in too long. Because there they were, together: men who saw the office as more important than the self, who saw country as more important than politics. “Our common humanity…the bonds of trust…fairness, common sense and mutual respect.” Obama’s words.

But it was the other Obama, Michelle, who held my heart in her hands. Strong, graceful, powerful. Intellect without pretension. Moral conviction without self-righteousness. Clarity. Conviction. Generosity. The voice I needed to hear.

I am, for at least a moment, able to breathe deeply. This is what I want to use that breath to say as we anticipate our country’s 250th birthday on July 4.

We are all citizens of the land of the wounded. I don’t mean personal wounds, although there are those, and they hurt. I mean deep wounds to the body politic, to the country itself, to ideals, values, compassion, justice, and fairness.

In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag writes: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

I want to remember, I want us to remember, that we too hold dual citizenship: one to this severely wounded country we see before us on our 250th birthday, and one to that other country, the kingdom of the well, the one where our best selves live. The one where we care. The one where we act on caring. The one where Michelle Obama’s voice rings out.

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I walked my first Camino, the Francés, a year after my husband’s death. I knew what I was walking away from—that life I would no longer be living—but I had no idea what I was walking toward. During those 37 days, I experienced both deep solitude and intense camaraderie. I lived both in my head and in the moment. I was bombarded with ah-ha moments and teaching moments, with epiphanies and what I hoped would be life lessons. If you allow it, if you want it, if you seek it, the Camino quietly dismantles the story you brought with you—and replaces it with something else, something lived. I wrote about this trek in Everything Changes Everything.

I returned the following year to walk the Portuguese. That journey, I thought, was about independence—mine. In the intervening year, and with the help of that first Camino, I had moved from shock and numbness to a sweet sorrow. I had begun, slowly, to let go. Not to forget. But to imagine a future. I was learning emotional independence. I walked the Portuguese to give that learning a body. And I did.

But I learned something else on that journey—or rather I started to learn, or realized I needed to learn. It was how to gracefully carry what needed to be carried. To embrace the burden, make peace with it, stop thinking of it as a burden. I learned this from Amy, a mid-30s nurse from the U.K. who carried, on her back, a 15-pound rucksack, and on her front, Sasha, her 25-pound, nine-month-son. She was smart and funny and joyful. She walked unburdened.

I returned again for the Norte and the Primitivo. Brave, independent, self-confident me. Ha. I had spent the year studying at what I think of as the School of Self-Sufficiency. I was learning to carry the weight without thinking about it every day. Now I would test these lessons.

Ah, but remember: the Camino dismantles the story you brought with you—and replaces it with lived experience.

That lived experience on the Primitivo, which I wrote a bit about in last week’s essay, turned out to be about vulnerability. Mine. Yes, the brave, independent, self-confident me. But it was also about something I didn’t write about in that essay: what it means to be held—and to hold—in a relationship. Not the idea of it, not the vow of it, but the unspoken practice of it. I had taken for granted I’ve got your back—that quiet, steady presence that undergirds everything—until I no longer had it. I returned from that Camino with a very sore medial collateral ligament and with more love for my husband than I had when he was alive.

There are many reasons to walk. And much to learn. If you are imagining—or planning—to walk a Camino, you may be thinking about the physical demands. Listen: the emotional and psychological demands are just as real. Sometimes more so.

But the payoffs—oh, the payoffs—are worth every step. Worth every dismantled story. Worth every hard-won, lived truth.

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I am, in fact, not running at all. I am barely walking. My knee is bad, as in borderline agonizing. And this from a woman who went through 42 hours of labor and has a very high pain threshold. Every step hurts, the sensations toggling between sharp and stabbing, and dull and aching. I am a newcomer to physical injury and have very little patience (or experience) with this.

I figure it will work itself out. It works itself into more pain.

Then I figure Ibuprofen. Barely touches it.

I go to a Farmacia, describe my symptoms, and leave with a tube of Radio Salil. It smells of mint and menthol and camphor. I slather it on. It is nice to smell of something other than sweat. It does not help.

I walk on.

This is my fourth-ish Camino. I started on the Norte, walked two weeks, then veered off at Villaviciosa to connect up in Olveido with the Primitivo. This second route, the oldest of the official caminos de Santiago, is rugged and demanding, with steep, remote mountain assents. The longer I walk, the more I hurt. On the Norte, which was gentler, I had met Poli and Tino, Sevillians who were best friends for decades, and Christina, a Canary Islander who had made her home in the U.K. A lovely Peruvian woman who was living in Australia, joined up every so often. The easy camaraderie—plus the mostly gentle terrain—had kept me going.

Now I am on the Primitivo, alone, trudging, limping, sweating (sobbing) up and down hills. I know what I’m doing. (I tell myself.) I am not a quitter. (I tell myself.)

I walk on.

On the trail one afternoon, after I had walked long hours without seeing anyone, a fellow pilgrim appears. He notes my stumbling gait. “Vamos a descansar,” he says, motioning me over to rest at a clearing. He opens his pack, finds a tube of Voltaren, and insists I take it. “Me ayuda con el dolor,” he tells me. We share an orange and some nuts. He moves on. I watch him hiking at the pace I would normally hike. I feel very sorry for myself. I sit for a while, rub my leg with the gifted Voltaren. Alas, it does not ayuda my dolor.

One night, in the common room of an albergue, a fellow pilgrim tapes me up with her kinesio strips. My leg looks badass. It doesn’t help.

Another night, in a surprisingly lovely albergue (no bunk beds! Cotton sheets!), a massage therapist from North Carolina who has the bed next to mine, works on my leg. It feels amazing. For an hour.

I cancel the reservation I made for the next albergue, which is 25k away. I walked this distance every day, and a lot more, on the Francés, the Portuguese, the Norte. I cannot imagine doing this now. After the following night in an albergue barely 15k down the trail, I do the unthinkable: I take a bus. In an hour and a half, seated with my leg extended, feeling only the agony of defeat not the agony of the knee, I eliminate two full days of walking.

This is my little secret. I tell no one. On that pilgrimage, which lasts another three days and ends with a miserable, cold, rainy slog into Santiago, I continue to post pretty pictures. And feed the FOMO fever of those who follow my trek.

Now I confess. Mea culpa.

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I am also a reader who shies away from reading memoirs.

I know. I know. Memoirs are well loved. And popular. Nearly half of all New York Times nonfiction bestsellers are memoirs. (Alas, not mine.) In addition to the few thousand published traditionally every year, many tens of thousands of self-published memoirs make their way to the marketplace. “Memoirs and Autobiographies” is the #1 best-selling hard copy book category on Amazon.

Let me be clear (as every politician now begins their speech): I believe in the soul of the memoir: the truth-telling, the lesson-learning, the meaning-making. I believe we are all the authors of our own lives. I believe that writing helps us navigate the stormy seas of our lives, helps us make sense of it all. I believe in the memoirist as eye/I witness.

But I also believe there is a significant difference between private processing and crafted narrative, between therapy and literature, and most especially, between memory and fact.

Here’s my beef: Memoirs are classified, marketed, and generally understood as nonfiction. As such, they trade on a particular kind of authority: the quiet but powerful assurance that this happened. You are not just reading a “story” intentionally plotted, carefully crafted for drama and tension. You are exploring someone’s actual experience. That authenticity carries weight. A lot of weight.

And yet memoirs are crafted from selective memory, the product of insight-after-the-fact, of impressions made long ago. They are most often not based on research, fieldwork and fact-finding, the methods nonfiction authors employ to gather the material they will write about, the methods I have used across the body of my work over the past two and a half decades.

This is the dilemma I faced as a veteran nonfiction writer writing a memoir.

I faced this, I hope head-on, when I wrote Everything Changes Everything. That doesn’t mean I got it all right. It means I played by the rules I know as a nonfiction writer. I had notes and documents, voice memos, photographs and video to refer to. I did research, a lot of research. I talked to others who were there with me, wherever “there” was. I could do this because I was living the story, much of it in real time. Still I struggled.

You can see (read) how I sought to resolve the tension I feel between nonfiction and memoir in the Author’s Note I wrote for the book:

This is a work of nonfiction—and it is also a memoir. Everything in it is fact-based, grounded in research, or drawn from direct experience. But every observation, every memory, every moment has passed through me. And that makes it subjective.

Memoir and nonfiction are often seen as opposites: one memory-inspired and personal, the other objective and reportorial. I reject that dichotomy.

All the people in this book are real. I have not invented or combined characters, nor knowingly altered any facts about their lives.

The events in this book are real. Most I witnessed (and lived through) firsthand and documented in real time. Others I reconstructed using notes, emails, texts, photos, and documents. I have not altered details to “assist” the narrative.

The dialog comes from direct observation (and participation), contemporaneous documentation, or memory assisted by my own journal entries, photographs, and interviews. I have rendered it as faithfully as I could.

I’ve done my best to offer both facts and insight—the reportorial and the personal—with accuracy and care. I have actively struggled with the complexity of memory, emotion, and lived experience.

It’s life, after all.

For those who write memoir, for fans of memoir, I’d love to hear from you on this.

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I no longer know what those words mean.

It hurts to write such a sentence. I do it here to grab your attention so that you will read this iconic, dare I say epic, essay.

I’ll stop now.

As a writer who strives to, and sweats over, finding and using words that carry precise emotional and intellectual weight, it pains me to watch some of the tools of my trade lose their heft, their edge, their usefulness. It hurts to watch these small, incremental (and cumulative) betrayals of language.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Bespoke. A word with a lovely linguistic history (hand-tailored suits from Savile Row) that implied an intimate relationship between maker and buyer. It has now devolved into a bloated buzzword slapped onto mass-produced items to add a veneer of pretentious luxury (and a higher price tag).

Literally. Don’t. Get. Me. Started. It is now a generic intensifier, a filler word, instead of indicating something that happened exactly as described. “I literally died.” Really? Then I guess you’re not here to utter this sentence, are you?

Perfect (and pun-y) use of the word “literally.

Curated. Museum collections are carefully, thoughtfully, expertly selected. That is: They are curated. Now curated is used to refer to most any collection, a fancy word for “we picked stuff for you,” the “we” probably an algorithm. Is your Spotify playlist expertly curated? I think not.

Luxury. Once rare enough to mean something (craftsmanship, exclusivity) we now have—oh yes we do--“luxury vinyl flooring,” which is a composite of polyvinyl chloride, limestone dust, Dioctyl Terephthalate, and Benzoate Esters. Sink into the luxury of that, why dontchya?

Awesome. A word long drained of its awe and reverence. If finding a convenient parking spot is deemed “awesome” does that mean this bit of luck was inspired by something vast and powerful that challenges our understanding of the world? When is the last time you felt something gasp-worthy and magical—but had no word left for it?

Artisanal. What it used to mean: Made by the hands of a trained craftsperson (or in a small workshop) that depended on local materials and generation-spanning methods, no two items being exactly alike. What it means now: Nothing. Sara Lee Artesano is thick-sliced white bread dusted with flour to mimic a bakery loaf. It is mass-produced in centralized commercial factories. And then there are Tostitos Artisan Recipes tortilla chips.

Game changer. True game changers fundamentally rewrite the script, whatever that script might be, making the previous reality obsolete. Think smart phones. Or antibiotics. CRISPR, generative AI, GLP-1. But not, for example, that “game-changing” new refrigerator that is the old refrigerator with a tiny chip that performs the same tasks (but now you need a smart phone).

Epic. A small word that used to pack a wallop, it referred to something vast, grand, heroic, legendary. Now it’s used to describe a good burrito.

We have leveled the peaks of these once mighty words. We have made them ordinary.

I know I am way too late to the party to save “awe.” I wish I could. I am in awe of the clouds at 30,000 feet, of just about every Mary Oliver poem, of the lightning-quick language acquisition of a two-year-old. But the word no longer expresses the wonder and amazement.

I want that word back. It would be epic. A literal game-changer.

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Brian’s wife was Cheryl Strayed, and together they were, as one of Brian’s eulogizer’s aptly put it, “Portland Royalty.” I knew of and had several times met Cheryl, and like so very many others, admired not just her work but the ease and grace with which she handled her fame and navigated her life.

She announced Brian’s illness on social media (not naming the disease but describing it as “fatal”) and then soon thereafter, it seemed to me barely a month, she announced his death. The post was a beautiful piece of writing because even in grief or shock, even numb and overcome, Cheryl would be incapable of writing anything other than quietly lyrical sentences.

And then came the remembrances. Friends of Brian. Collaborators on his documentaries. Lewis & Clark classmates. Film critics. Fellow documentarians. People who had never met him but had been touched by his work. Memories, anecdotes, photos, kind and tender words—posted, shared, multiplied.

For Cheryl and her (their) two children, it was a tsunami of public grief.

As one not so long ago walloped by the death of a very good man with whom I had made a very good life, a stellar father, and—not like Brian, but in his own way – an admired public figure, I watched this virtual outpouring with curiosity, and with heart-ache.

I wondered: Did these memories and stories, these anecdotes and photos, these kind and tender words from both strangers and friends, did this soothe Cheryl? Did any of it ease the weight, even by a gram? I wondered if Cheryl wished she could grieve in private.

But maybe not. She is a public person. They were a public couple. It may be that this outpouring felt like affirmation: Brian mattered. But Cheryl and their children didn’t need that affirmation. They lived it.

Public grief expands the narrative beyond the finality of death. And yet Brian’s work already does that more permanently than any single memory.

This tension I feel refuses to settle.

I wonder about the pressure of public grief, the implicit or explicit requirement to participate in the mediated narrative. To respond, curate, be gracious. To become, in a sense, the steward of other people’s grief as well as their own.

And as I know, as anyone who has faced great loss knows, grief has its own pace: halting, disoriented, nonlinear. Public grief runs on a different clock: immediate, declarative, already forming sentences. Before the bereaved have even located themselves inside the loss, the world has begun to describe it.

I wonder what that feels like.

I remember how little I could name in those first days and weeks, how even language felt premature.

I wonder about my own decision, my family’s decision, to hold our grief close to the chest. To the heart.

And what, exactly, that protected—and what it cost.

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And yet, the reality of loss does not evaporate in the spring sunshine. Sometimes, unexpectedly, unbidden, the spring sunshine does the opposite. It illuminates what is no longer there.

Like seeing the first blossoms on the apple trees out in the orchard, and all of a sudden remembering that year we rented an old-fashioned wooden press and made our own cider.

Like out mowing the lawn, and all of a sudden seeing a mirage on the meadow. He is out there riding the mower wearing the only hat that fits his oversized head, the one I bought him at least a decade ago. He’s listening to some audio book to drown out the drone of the engine. Probably some geeky science thing which he will “explain” to me over dinner later. One year I found a card with a cartoon of a guy on a riding mower with the caption, “the lawn ranger.” I printed out a copy, and left it, anonymously, (ha) on his desk.

Like putting on the filthy old barn jacket, his, to go out and pick lettuce in the cool of the morning and finding a balled up tissue, his, in the pocket which, according to a science story I read in the New York Times, contains “copious amounts of (his) DNA.”

I know framing this as “illuminating the loss” makes these remembered moments seem sad or mournful. No. Not at all. In fact, the opposite. Or maybe not “opposite,” but rather a graceful balance, an integration of bitter and sweet. It is the integration in and of my life: what was and what is no longer and what still is and what might be. It feels powerful to be in this place now four and a half years after his death.

I am re-reading Susan Cain’s Bittersweet. I read it as I eat dinner, most often fish and a plate of the roasted vegetables he hated. That’s the bitter (I sort of miss him telling me how much he detests Brussel’s sprouts and that cauliflower is overrated) and the sweet (I get to eat them all I want).

Which brings me to page 227 in Cain’s book and this sentence: “The idea is not to paper over your loss…the idea is smaller than that, yet also grander: that after all the grief and loss and disruption you are still—you always will be—exactly who you are.”

And so I am.

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Where is here?

I’ve been thinking about this, for reasons obvious to anyone who has read Everything Changes Everything.

Maybe their soul is here, and that’s what we feel. But when the body is opened, examined, named part by part, no soul is found. If we can’t see it, does that mean it isn’t there? I don’t know.

Most people, it turns out, believe the dead are somewhere. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe in heaven. Just over half believe in hell. Globally, about a third of adults believe in reincarnation—another version of elsewhere, another way of saying not gone.

We seem to need a place to put the dead. Up there. Down below. Back again.

I don’t believe any of that.

And still, I feel the presence of my husband.

Not as a ghost. Not as a voice in my head. Not as memory rising up in some predictable swell of sorrow. Something else. Ineffable. There but not there. Always there but out of reach. Palpable, but not touchable.

And that, I think, is the sadness. Not that I have lost him (I have not) but that he is here—perhaps even more fully, energetically here than he was when he walked the earth—but that we cannot touch.

Although once, we did.

It happened at the end of the second day of my walk across northern Spain, the Camino Frances journey I undertook a year after his death. This is the scene from my book, Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk.

That night I had a dream so real, so palpable, that when I awoke, I was convinced it had actually happened. In the dream Tom knelt beside the bunkbed, reached in, and touched my shoulder. I felt that touch. In the dream, I got out of bed. I stood up. And we embraced, the kind of full-body embrace that lasts long enough for you to feel the other person’s body heat. I felt that embrace. I felt that heat. Then we stood apart.

“Go,” he said.

When you dream, your subconscious is trying to tell you something. When you dream of people who have died, you pay close attention. My dreams are often embarrassingly obvious. Once I dreamt I hit my father over the head with a frying pan. Like that.

“Go,” said Tom, who was for three decades my husband.

It was a command, both forceful and loving. But it was also, or so it seemed to me when I awoke in the dark the next morning, him giving me permission. Not permission to do this thing—I didn’t need that from him, dead or alive—but permission to walk into a future that did not include him. Permission to become who I was going to become.

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My scrolling and clicking and viewing and revisiting have shaped much of what now shows up in my social media feeds.

I don’t mind all the videos of sumptuous first-class seating and BVLGARI amenity kits and rare white sturgeon caviar on Emirates. I love the guy who answers every question by defaulting to his love of cheese. The guy who dresses in a bad wig and takes his partner (that would be him, sans wig) to task for his lack of empathy and emotional intelligence? Love that. And Maggie Weber who posts and comments on embarrassing business names and unintentionally vulgar logos? Oh yes. Give me more. And while cat videos are so yesterday, I cannot resist that guy who goes through his feline’s purse to find a MasterCat credit card, a tube of black lipstick, and a very small pocket knife.

That’s the good news. That’s the fun stuff.

But lately—my fault—the reels that have been showing up are (mostly) young women sobbing in their cars as they relate their (mostly) horrific cancer “journeys.” Sometimes they post from hospital rooms, just recovering from or going into surgery. They relate scary biopsy findings and scans that show new mets and chemo that no longer works. And it is all heartbreaking. And compelling. I am also getting an extraordinary number of videos made by mothers who have given birth to babies with severe disabilities or life-threatening conditions or rare incurable diseases.

And I wonder why.

Not why I’m seeing them—I understand that, and take responsibility for it—but why they are making them. Every day, sometimes.

Some creators say they are compelled by a desire to help others in similar situations or to bring awareness to struggles often hidden. This is admirable. But surely some of it is also driven by loneliness or depression—a need to tell, and no one close enough to listen.

But it’s more complicated than that. Because these women are not speaking into a void. They are speaking into a kind of vast, invisible room filled with strangers who witness, respond, return. It’s messy, sometimes performative, sometimes raw, sometimes monetized—but it is also a form of being seen.

But what kind of witnessing is this? What kind of companionship?

I think something else is going on underneath this, interwoven with it. And I think it is connected to how many people now consider their chatbot their best friend or closest confidant.

Humans are storytelling animals. It’s how we make sense of our lives, how we learn about others, how we learn about the world. We. Tell. Stories. In telling our own stories—to ourselves, to others—we untangle the tangles, we create order out of chaos, we find (or struggle to find) meaning out of randomness.

Increasingly we live silo-ed lives, especially those of us who work from home. Who stream our entertainment. Who get our dinner delivered to our doorstep. Increasingly, we live solitary lives. (The share of people living alone was 7.7 percent n 1940, 13 percent in 1960, and today is close to 30 percent.)

So to whom do we tell our stories? Do we have so few actual humans in our lives that our closest companions are generative AI bots? Do we have so few caring friends that we have to relate our tragic tales to strangers by talking into cellphones propped up against steering wheels?

I am more saddened and scared by this than I am by the current state of our politics. Which is saying A LOT.

And here I am, typing this on a screen, standing in front of my computer in a room in a house where I live alone.

Telling you this.

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Substack Central sends me this message when someone clicks “subscribe” and also pledges a dollar amount, should I choose to enable paid subscriptions. I do not monetize. But the button is there.

I find the message unsettling.

Yes, it’s flattering—someone thinks my work is worthy of their money. But it also introduces something that hadn’t been there before: doubt. A calculus. A subtle redefinition of value. My writing, which had existed outside of transaction, is suddenly measurable in dollars.

There are hundreds of thousands of newsletters on Substack. Almost 60 percent have paid subscriptions enabled, but only 6 percent of readers actually pay. A small percentage of writers earn meaningful income. Of those, the top 5 percent generate more than 90 percent of the earnings. Almost all came to the platform with audiences already in place. Substack did not so much create these writers as amplify them.

I could make a modest—and I mean modest—income from those who have clicked that button. But I ask myself: If I do that, what changes?

Before: I write. You read (if you want).
After: I write. You pay. I deliver.

You are now my customer.

I need to provide value. I need to deliver product. I start noticing what lands, what brings in new subscribers. Am I tempted to give you what it seems you want, even if it’s not exactly what I want to write? Do I begin to sort my readers by what they pay? Hold back for some, offer more to others? Create a special relationship with the ones who pay me the most?

Writing that had been an offering—an invitation to inquiry, a prompt to conversation—begins to feel like content. Output. Goods in the marketplace.

And yet, there is a paradox. Charging can deepen commitment, attract more devoted readers, create a tighter community. And, whether I buy into this (pun intended) or not, charging may add value simply because “you get what you pay for.”

Do I believe writers should be paid? Yes. A big yes.

But for me, at this moment, I want to hold on to one place where my writing does not have to prove its worth in dollars.

I want to add a note here to those who have clicked (and continue to click) on the “donate” button to pledge an amount should I enable that function: I am delighted and honored that you did this. It continues to be a lovely surprise. I am so very glad to have you as readers. I take NOTHING for granted, especially your support. Or the support of ALL you who read these weekly essays.

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The visual, maybe even visceral, power of the church is here. The premier temple of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, a massive 210-foot high, 253,000-square foot, six-spired, gleaming white granite structure, is somehow not dwarfed by either the 10,000-foot Wasatch Mountains or the new skyscrapers of the city. It has bulk. It has gravitas. It has meaning.

The temple makes a major statement. But downtown there is also the historic Tabernacle (home of the choir), the 21,000-seat Conference Center, the Assembly Hall, a high-rise church building, a massive Family History Library, the Beehive House (Brigham Young’s official residence), and the Lion House (home to the many sister wives of Mr. Young).

The city itself may have become increasingly (religiously) diverse as the population has soared--Mormons are actually now in the minority, perhaps 40 percent of the population--but the presence of the church is unquestionable.

The Mormon origin story is a challenge to the rational mind. It goes like this: In 1823, an Angel visits a 17 year old asleep in his bedroom, directing him to gold plates buried in a nearby hill. On these plates is text written in “reformed Egyptian” which the teen (that would be Joseph Smith) translates by placing special stones in a hat. The translated words (they appear on these “seer stones” not on the plates themselves) is a record of prophets’ (and Jesus’) spiritual journeys on the American continent, from 600BC to 400AD. This is the Book of Mormon.

I read about this on my phone, sitting on a bench in Temple Square. I shake my head. Who could possibly believe this story?

Islam has a parallel narrative to tell: a 40-year-old (that would be Muhammad) meditating in a cave receives revelations via an angel. These revelations are a direct transmission from the divine into the human language. This is the Qur’an.

Is the tale of a virgin birth any more believable?

I understand men like Joseph Smith or women like St. Teresa or St. Catherine who report visions, who have felt the presence of something big and powerful, who are transformed by an unfathomable experience. I understand because I, too, have felt this. I have felt this hiking alone on a dirt path in the forest with the early morning sun slanting through the trees. I have felt this at 35,000 feet staring out the window at a blanket of clouds.

There is something. It is bigger than me. It is bigger than life. It is beyond knowing.

I understand the force of this ineffable something. What I don’t understand, as I walk the streets of Salt Lake City, is not how 17 million people believe Joseph Smith’s story, the Mormon origin tale—but how I draw the line between what feels true to me and what feels impossible.

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Yes. This is a trick question.

Because no—I am not referring to I love you.

I have heard I love you from men, including an extraordinary one. Someone who loved me until death did we part. I hear it from my children, who feel it, as I do, with immeasurable depth. I hear it more casually, but no less sincerely, from friends, old and new, near and distant.

But for me, I love you is not the sweetest three-word sentence.

The sweetest sentence is: I got you.

As in: I see you. I understand. I’ve got your back. You can count on me. I am here to support you in whatever way you need, in this moment and for the long haul, without strings.

Those words are powerful. But they are even more powerful when unspoken.

When Claudia—not an everyday friend but a soul-sister—showed up to work with me all day, side by side, sorting through Lizzie’s storage unit. This was one of the worst days of my life. I didn’t ask for help. She didn’t ask if I needed it. She just showed up. I got you. The message could not have been clearer. Or more loving.

When Karuna didn’t ask. She just got in her car and drove two hours to have coffee with me because she knew—she knew—that what I needed was dark humor in dark times.

When Tino, a Spaniard I met a few days into hiking El Camino del Norte, fell in behind me on a hard climb in the late afternoon sun. He placed his hands under my backpack and lifted it up, held it, taking the weight from my shoulders. Two years later, I can still feel that lightening. The relief. The surprise of being cared for.

When Zane, my younger son, saw I was drowning in details a few days ago and said, “Why don’t you go make some tea. I’ll do this.”

I got you has so much power.
It is better than love.
Or, rather, it is love made manifest.