essay about the love of my life

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The Love Of My Life

The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so,” he said slowly. He didn’t take his eyes off me. I rolled the rings around on my fingers. I was wearing two wedding bands, my own and my mother’s. I’d taken hers off her hand after she died. It was nothing fancy: sterling silver, thick and braided.

“You look like the kind of girl who has a cat.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just kept looking at me steadily, as if he knew everything about me, as if he owned me. I felt distinctly that he might be a murderer.

“Are you mature?” he asked intently.

I didn’t know what he meant. I still don’t. I told him that I was.

“Well then prove it and walk down the street with me.”

We left the cafe, his hand on my arm. I had monstrous bruises on my knees from how I’d fallen on them after I walked into my mother’s hospital room and first saw her dead. He liked these. He said he’d been admiring them from across the room. They were what had drawn him to me. Also, he liked my boots. He thought I looked intriguing. He thought I looked mature. I was twenty-two. He was older, possibly thirty. I didn’t ask his name; he didn’t ask mine. I walked with him to a parking lot behind a building. He stopped and pressed me against a brick wall and kissed me, but then he wasn’t kissing me. He was biting me. He bit my lips so hard I screamed.

“You lying cunt,” he whispered into my ear. “You’re not mature.” He flung me away from him and left.

I stood, unmoving, stunned. The inside of my mouth began to bleed softly. Tears filled my eyes. I want my mother , I thought. My mother is dead. I thought this every hour of every day for a very long time: I want my mother. My mother is dead.

It was only a kiss, and barely that, but it was, anyway, a crossing. When I was a child I witnessed a leaf unfurl in a single motion. One second it was a fist, the next an open hand. I never forgot it, seeing so much happen so fast. And this was like that — the end of one thing, the beginning of another: my life as a slut.

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, my husband Mark and I took an unspoken sexual hiatus. When she died seven weeks later, I couldn’t bear for Mark to touch me. His hands on my body made me weep. He went down on me in the gentlest of ways. He didn’t expect anything in return. He didn’t make me feel that I had to come. I would soak in a hot bath, and he would lean into it to touch me. He wanted to make me feel good, better. He loved me, and he had loved my mother. Mark and I were an insanely young, insanely happy, insanely in-love married couple. He wanted to help. No, no, no, I said, but then sometimes I relented. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. I breathed deep and attempted to fake it. I rolled over on my stomach so I wouldn’t have to look at him. He fucked me and I sobbed uncontrollably.

“Keep going,” I said to him. “Just finish.” But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He loved me. Which was mysteriously, unfortunately, precisely the problem.

I wanted my mother.

We aren’t supposed to want our mothers that way, with the pining intensity of sexual love, but I did, and if I couldn’t have her, I couldn’t have anything. Most of all I couldn’t have pleasure, not even for a moment. I was bereft, in agony, destroyed over her death. To experience sexual joy, it seemed, would have been to negate that reality. And more, it would have been to betray my mother, to be disloyal to the person she had been to me: my hero, a single mother after she bravely left an unhealthy relationship with my father when I was five. She remarried when I was eleven. My stepfather had loved her and been a good husband to her for ten years, but shortly after she died, he’d fallen in love with someone else. His new girlfriend and her two daughters moved into my mother’s house, took her photos off the walls, erased her. I needed my stepfather to be the kind of man who would suffer for my mother, unable to go on, who would carry a torch. And if he wouldn’t do it, I would.

We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek , or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done. Countless well-intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was alarmed by how many people knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated our cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time.

I did not deny. I did not get angry. I didn’t bargain, become depressed, or accept. I fucked. I sucked. Not my husband, but people I hardly knew, and in that I found a glimmer of relief. The people I messed around with did not have names; they had titles: the Prematurely Graying Wilderness Guide, the Technically Still a Virgin Mexican Teenager, the Formerly Gay Organic Farmer, the Quietly Perverse Poet, the Failing but Still Trying Massage Therapist, the Terribly Large Texas Bull Rider, the Recently Unemployed Graduate of Juilliard, the Actually Pretty Famous Drummer Guy. Most of these people were men; some were women. With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun. I was wild and enigmatic and terrifically good in bed. I didn’t care about them or have orgasms. We didn’t have heart-to-heart talks. I asked them questions about their lives, and they told me everything and asked few questions in return; they knew nothing about me. Because of this, most of them believed they were falling instantly, madly in love with me.

I did what I did with these people, and then I returned home to Mark, weak-kneed and wet, bleary-eyed and elated. I’m alive , I thought in that giddy, postsex daze. My mother’s death has taught me to live each day as if it were my last, I said to myself, latching onto the nearest cliché, and the one least true. I didn’t stop to think: What if it had been my last day? Did I wish to be sucking the cock of an Actually Pretty Famous Drummer Guy? I didn’t think to ask that because I didn’t want to think. When I did think, I thought, I cannot continue to live without my mother.

I lied — sometimes to the people I messed around with (some of them, if they’d known I was married, would not have wanted to mess around with me), but mostly to Mark. I was not proud of myself. I was in love with him and wanted to be faithful to him and wanted to want to have sex with him, but something in me wouldn’t let me do it. We got into the habit of fucking in the middle of the night, both of us waking from a sound sleep to the reality of our bodies wet and hard and in the act. The sex lasted about thirty seconds, and we would almost always both come. It was intensely hot and strange and surreal and darkly funny and ultimately depressing. We never knew who started it. Neither of us recalled waking, reaching for each other. It was a shard of passion, and we held on to it. For a while it got us through.

We like to say how things are, perhaps because we hope that’s how they might actually be. We attempt to name, identify, and define the most mysterious of matters: sex, love, marriage, monogamy, infidelity, death, loss, grief. We want these things to have an order, an internal logic, and we also want them to be connected to one another. We want it to be true that if we cheat on our spouse, it means we no longer want to be married to him or her. We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged.

After my mother died, everyone I knew wanted to tell me either about the worst breakup they’d had or all the people they’d known who’d died. I listened to a long, traumatic story about a girlfriend who suddenly moved to Ohio, and to stories of grandfathers and old friends and people who lived down the block who were no longer among us. Rarely was this helpful.

Occasionally I came across people who’d had the experience of losing someone whose death made them think, I cannot continue to live . I recognized these people: their postures, where they rested their eyes as they spoke, the expressions they let onto their faces and the ones they kept off. These people consoled me beyond measure. I felt profoundly connected to them, as if we were a tribe.

It’s surprising how relatively few of them there were. People don’t die anymore, not the way they used to. Children survive childhood; women, the labors of birth; men, their work. We survive influenza and infection, cancer and heart attacks. We keep living on and on: 80, 90, 103. We live younger, too; frightfully premature babies are cloistered and coddled and shepherded through. My mother lived to the age of forty-five and never lost anyone who was truly beloved to her. Of course, she knew many people who died, but none who made her wake to the thought: I cannot continue to live.

And there is a difference. Dying is not your girlfriend moving to Ohio. Grief is not the day after your neighbor’s funeral, when you felt extremely blue. It is impolite to make this distinction. We act as if all losses are equal. It is un-American to behave otherwise: we live in a democracy of sorrow. Every emotion felt is validated and judged to be as true as any other.

But what does this do to us: this refusal to quantify love, loss, grief? Jewish tradition states that one is considered a mourner when one of eight people dies: father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife, son, or daughter. This definition doesn’t fulfill the needs of today’s diverse and far-flung affections; indeed, it probably never did. It leaves out the step-relations, the long-term lovers, the chosen family of a tight circle of friends; and it includes the blood relations we perhaps never honestly loved. But its intentions are true. And, undeniably, for most of us that list of eight does come awfully close. We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

For years, I was haunted by the idea of this imaginary boat of life; by the desire to exchange my mother’s fate for one of the many living people I knew. I would be sitting across the table from a dear friend. I loved her, him, each one of these people. Some I said I loved like family. But I would look at them and think, Why couldn’t it have been you who died instead? You, goodbye.

We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek , or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done.

I didn’t often sleep with Mark, but I slept beside him, or tried to. I dreamed incessantly about my mother. There was a theme. Two or three times a week she made me kill her. She commanded me to do it, and I sobbed and got down on my knees, begging her not to make me, but she would not relent. In each dream, like a good daughter, I ultimately complied. I tied her to a tree in our front yard, poured gasoline over her head, and lit her on fire. I made her run down the dirt road that passed by the house where I’d grown up, and I ran her over with my truck; I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. I took a miniature baseball bat and beat her to death with it. I forced her into a hole I’d dug and kicked dirt and stones on top of her and buried her alive. These dreams were not surreal. They took place in the plain light of day. They were the documentary films of my subconscious and felt as real to me as life. My truck was really my truck; our front yard was our actual front yard; the miniature baseball bat sat in our closet among the umbrellas. I didn’t wake from these dreams crying; I woke shrieking. Mark grabbed me and held me. He wetted a washcloth with cool water and put it over my face. These dreams went on for months, years, and I couldn’t shake them. I also couldn’t shake my infidelities. I couldn’t shake my grief.

What was there to do with me? What did those around me do? They did what I would have done — what we all do when faced with the prospect of someone else’s sorrow: they tried to talk me out of it, neutralize it, tamp it down, make it relative and therefore not so bad. We narrate our own lesser stories of loss in an attempt to demonstrate that the sufferer is not really so alone. We make grossly inexact comparisons and hope that they will do. In short, we insist on ignoring the precise nature of deep loss because there is nothing we can do to change it, and by doing so we strip it of its meaning, its weight, its own fiercely original power.

Nobody knew about my sexual escapades. I kept waiting for them to cure me, or for something to cure me of them. Two years had passed since my mother’s death, and I still couldn’t live without her, but I also couldn’t live with myself.

The first person I knew who died was a casual friend of my mother’s named Barb. Barb was in her early thirties, and I was ten. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, her skin clear and smooth as a bar of soap. She had the kind of tall body that made you acutely aware of the presence of its bones: a long, knobby nose; wide, thin hips; a jaw too pointed to be considered beautiful. Barb got into her car and started the engine. Her car was parked in a garage and all the doors were closed and she had stuffed a Minnesota Vikings cap into the exhaust pipe. My mother explained this to me in detail: the Vikings hat, the sitting in the car with the garage door closed on purpose. I was more curious than sad. But in the months that followed, I thought of Barb often. I came to care for her. I nurtured an inflated sense of my connection to her.

Recently, another acquaintance of mine died. He was beautiful and young and free-spirited and one hell of a painter. He went hiking one day on the Oregon coast and was never seen again. Over the course of my life, I have known other people who’ve died. Some of them have died the way we hoped they would — old, content, at their time; others, the way we hoped they wouldn’t — by murder or suicide, in accidents, or too young of illnesses. The deaths of those people made me sad, afraid, and angry; they made me question the fairness of the world, the existence of God, and the nature of my own existence. But they did not make me suffer. They did not make me think, I cannot continue to live . In fact, in their deaths I felt more deeply connected to them, not because I grieved them, but because I wanted to attach myself to what is interesting. It is interesting to be in a Chinese restaurant and see a poster of the smiling face of an acquaintance, who is one hell of a painter, plastered on the front door. It is interesting to be able to say, I know him , to feel a part of something important and awful and big. The more connections like this we have, the more interesting we are.

There was nothing interesting to me about my mother’s death. I did not want to attach myself to it. It was her life that I clung to, her very, very interesting life. When she died, she was about to graduate from college, and so was I. We had started together. Her college was in Duluth, mine in Minneapolis. After a lifetime of struggle and sacrifice, my mother was coming into her own. She wanted to major in six subjects, but the school wouldn’t let her, so she settled on two.

My mother had become pregnant when she was nineteen and immediately married my father, a steelworker in western Pennsylvania when the steel plants were shutting down; a coal miner’s son born about the time that the coal was running out. After three children and nine years of misery, my mother left him. My father had recently moved us to a small town near Minneapolis in pursuit of a job prospect. When they divorced, he went back to Pennsylvania, but my mother stayed. She worked as a waitress and in a factory that made small plastic containers that would eventually hold toxic liquids. We lived in apartment complexes full of single mothers whose children sat on the edges of grocery-store parking lots. We received free government cheese and powdered milk, food stamps and welfare checks.

After a few years, my mother met my stepfather, and when he fell off a roof on the job and hurt his back, they took the twelve-thousand-dollar settlement and spent every penny on forty acres of land in northern Minnesota. There was no house; no one had ever had a house on this land. My stepfather built a one-room tar-paper shack, and we lived in it while he and my mother built us a house from scrap wood and trees they cut down with the help of my brother, my sister, and me. We moved into the new house on Halloween night. We didn’t have electricity or running water or a phone or an indoor toilet. Years passed, and my mother was happy — happier than she’d ever been — but still, she hungered for more.

Just before she died, she was thinking about becoming a costume designer, or a professor of history. She was profoundly interested in the American pioneers, the consciousness of animals, and the murders of women believed to be witches. She was looking into graduate school, though she feared that she was too old. She couldn’t believe, really, that she was even getting a degree. I’d had to convince her to go to college. She’d always read books but thought that she was basically stupid. To prepare, she shadowed me during my senior year of high school, doing all the homework that I was assigned. She photocopied my assignment sheets, wrote the papers I had to write, read the books. I graded her work, using my teacher’s marks as a guide. My mother was a shaky student at best.

She went to college and earned straight A’s.

She died on a Monday during spring break of our senior year. After her funeral, I immediately went back to school because she had begged me to do so. It was the beginning of a new quarter. In most of my classes, we were asked to introduce ourselves and say what we had done over the break. “My name is Cheryl,” I said. “I went to Mexico.”

I lied not to protect myself, but because it would have been rude not to. To express loss on that level is to cross a boundary, to violate personal space, to impose emotion in a nonemotional place.

We did not always treat grief this way. Nearly every culture has a history, and some still have a practice, of mourning rituals, many of which involve changes in the dress or appearance of those in grief. The wearing of black clothing or mourning jewelry, hair cutting, and body scarification or ritual tattooing all made the grief-stricken immediately visible to the people around them. Although it is true that these practices were sometimes ridiculously restrictive and not always in the best interest of the mourner, it is also true that they gave us something of value. They imposed evidence of loss on a community and forced that community to acknowledge it. If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.

We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.

Nobody knew about my sexual escapades. I kept waiting for them to cure me, or for something to cure me of them. Two years had passed since my mother’s death, and I still couldn’t live without her, but I also couldn’t live with myself. I decided to tell Mark the truth. The list was long. I practiced what I would say, trying to say it in the least painful way. It was impossible. It was time.

Mark sat in the living room playing his guitar. He was working as an organizer for a nonprofit environmental agency, but his real ambition was to be a musician. He had just formed his first band and was writing a new song, finding it as he went along. I told him that I had something to tell him and that it was not going to be easy. He stopped playing and looked at me, but he kept his hands on the guitar, holding it gently. This man whom I’d loved for years, had loved enough to marry, who had been with me through my mother’s death and the aftermath, who’d offered to go down on me in the gentlest of ways, who would do anything, anything for me, listened as I told him about the Technically Still a Virgin Mexican Teenager, the Prematurely Graying Wilderness Guide, the Recently Unemployed Graduate of Juilliard.

He fell straight forward out of his chair onto his knees and then face down onto the floor. His guitar went with him and it made clanging, strumming, hollow sounds as it went. I attempted to rub his back. He screamed for me to get my hands off him.

Later, spent, he calmly told me that he wanted to kill me. He promised he would if I’d given him AIDS .

Women are used to the bad behavior of men. But I had broken the rules. Even among our group of alternative, left-wing, hippie, punk-rock, artsy politicos, I was viewed by many as the worst kind of woman: the whore, the slut, the adulteress, the liar, the cheat. And to top it all off, I had wronged the best of men. Mark had been faithful to me all along.

He moved out and rented a room in the attic of a house. Slowly we told our friends. The Insanely Young, Insanely Happy, Insanely In-Love Married Couple was coming apart. First, they were in disbelief. Next, they were mad, or several of them were — not at us, but at me. One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame in her bedroom, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me. Another made out with Mark. When I was hurt and jealous about this I was told that perhaps it was exactly what I needed: a taste of my own medicine. I couldn’t rightfully disagree, but still my heart was broken. I lay alone in our bed feeling myself almost levitate from the pain.

We couldn’t decide whether to get divorced or not. We went to a marriage counselor and tried to work it out. Months later, we stopped the counseling and put the decision on hold. Mark began to date. He dated one of those women who, instead of a purse, carry a teeny-weeny backpack. He dated a biologist who also happened to be a model. He dated a woman I’d met once who’d made an enormous pot of very good chili of which I’d eaten two bowls.

His sex life temporarily cured me of mine. I didn’t fuck anyone, and I got crabs from a pair of used jeans I’d bought at a thrift store. I spent several days eradicating the translucent bugs from my person and my apartment. Then the Teeny-Weeny Backpack Woman started to play tambourine in Mark’s budding band. I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to visit a friend in Portland and decided to stay. I met a man: a Punk Rocker Soon to Be Hopelessly Held under the Thumb of Heroin. I found him remotely enchanting. I found heroin more enchanting. Quickly, without intending to, I slipped into a habit. Here , I thought. At last.

By now Mark pretty much hated me, but he showed up in Portland anyway and dragged me back home. He set a futon down for me in the corner of his room and let me stay until I could find a job and an apartment. At night we lay in our separate beds fighting about why we loved and hated each other so much. We made love once. He was cheating on someone for the first time. He was back with the Biologist Who Also Happened to Be a Model, and he was cheating on her with his own wife. Hmmm, we thought. What’s this?

But it was not to be. I was sorry. He was sorry. I wasn’t getting my period. I was really, really, really sorry. He was really, really, really mad. I was pregnant by the Punk Rocker Soon to Be Hopelessly Held under the Thumb of Heroin. We were at the end of the line. We loved each other, but love was not enough. We had become the Insanely Young, Insanely Sad, Insanely Messed-Up Married Couple. He wanted me gone. He pulled the blankets from my futon in his room and flung them down the stairs.

I sat for five hours in the office of an extremely overbooked abortion doctor, waiting for my abortion. The temperature in the room was somewhere around fifty-six degrees. It was packed with microscopically pregnant women who were starving because we had been ordered not to eat since the night before. The assistants of the Extremely Overbooked Abortion Doctor did not want to clean up any puke.

At last, I was brought into a room. I was told to undress and hold a paper sheet around myself. I was given a plastic breast and instructed to palpate it, searching for a lump of cancer hidden within its depths, while I waited for my abortion. I waited, naked, palpating, finding the cancer over and over again. The Extremely Overbooked Abortion Doctor needed to take an emergency long-distance phone call. An hour went by. Finally, she came in.

I lay back on the table and stared at a poster on the ceiling of a Victorian mansion that was actually composed of miniature photographs of the faces of a hundred famous and important women in history. I was told to lie still and peacefully for a while and then to stand up very quickly and pull my underwear on while an assistant of the Extremely Overbooked Abortion Doctor held me up. I was told not to have sex for a very long time. The procedure cost me four hundred dollars, half of which I was ridiculously hoping to receive from the Punk Rocker Soon to Be Hopelessly Held under the Thumb of Heroin. I went home to my new apartment. The light on my answering machine said I had three messages. I lay on my couch, ill and weak and bleeding, and listened to them.

There was a message from the Punk Rocker Soon to Be Hopelessly Held under the Thumb of Heroin, only he didn’t say anything. Instead he played a recording of a Radiohead song that went, “You’re so fucking special / I wish I was special / But I’m a creep / I’m a weirdo.”

There was a message that consisted of a thirty-second dial tone because the person had hung up.

There was a message from Mark wondering how I was.

My mother had been dead for three years. I was twenty-five. I had intended, by this point in my life, to have a title of my own: The Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. I had planned to be the kind of woman whose miniature photographed face was placed artfully into a poster of a Victorian mansion that future generations of women would concentrate on while their cervixes were forcefully dilated by the tip of a plastic tube about the size of a drinking straw and the beginnings of babies were sucked out of them. I wasn’t anywhere close. I was a pile of shit.

Despite my mother’s hopes, I had not graduated from college. I pushed my way numbly through that last quarter, but I did not, in the end, receive my bachelor’s degree because I had neglected to do one assignment: write a five-page paper about a short story called “The Nose,” by Nikolai Gogol. It’s a rollicking tale about a man who wakes up one morning and realizes that his nose is gone. Indeed, his nose has not only left him but has also dressed in the man’s clothes, taken his carriage, and gone gadding about town. The man does what anyone would do if he woke up and found that his nose was gone: he goes out to find it. I thought the story was preposterous and incomprehensible. Your nose does not just up and leave you. I was told not to focus on the unreality of it. I was told that the story was actually about vanity, pretentiousness, and opportunism in nineteenth-century Russia. Alternately, I could interpret it as a commentary upon either male sexual impotency or divine Immaculate Conception. I tried dutifully to pick one of these concepts and write about it, but I couldn’t do it, and I could not discuss with my professor why this was so. In my myopic, grief-addled state, the story seemed to me to be about something else entirely: a man who woke up one morning and no longer had a nose and then went looking for it. There was no subtext to me. It was simply a story about what it was about, which is to say, the absurd and arbitrary nature of disappearance, our hungry ache to resurrect what we’ve lost, and the bald truth that the impossible can become possible faster than anyone dreams.

All the time that I’d been thinking, I cannot continue to live , I’d also had the opposite thought, which was by far the more unbearable: that I would continue to live, and that every day for the rest of my life I would have to live without my mother. Sometimes I forgot this, like a trick of the brain, a primitive survival mechanism. Somewhere, floating on the surface of my subconscious, I believed — I still believe — that if I endured without her for one year, or five years, or ten years, or twenty, she would be given back to me; that her absence was a ruse, a darkly comic literary device, a terrible and surreal dream.

What does it mean to heal? To move on? To let go? Whatever it means, it is usually said and not done, and the people who talk about it the most have almost never had to do it. I cannot say anything about healing, but I can say that something happened as I lay on the couch bleeding and listening to my answering machine play the Radiohead song and then the dial tone and then Mark’s voice wondering how I was: I thought about writing the five-page paper about the story of the man who lost his nose. I thought about calling Mark and asking him to marry me again. I thought about becoming the Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. I thought about taking a very long walk. I decided to do all of these things immediately, but I did not move from the couch. I didn’t set out the next day either to write the paper about the guy who lost his nose. I didn’t call Mark and ask him to marry me again. I didn’t start to work on becoming the Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer. Instead I ordered pizza and listened to that one Lucinda Williams CD that I could not ever get enough of, and, after a few days, I went back to my job waiting tables. I let my uterus heal and then slept at least once with each of the five guys who worked in the kitchen. I did, however, hold on to one intention, and I set about fulfilling it: I was going to take a long walk. One thousand six hundred and thirty-eight miles, to be exact. Alone.

Mark and I had filed the papers for our divorce. My stepfather was going to marry the woman he’d started dating immediately after my mother died. I wanted to get out of Minnesota. I needed a new life and, unoriginally, I was going west to find it. I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail — a wilderness trail that runs along the backbone of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Mountains, from Mexico to Canada. Rather, I decided to hike a large portion of it — from the Mojave Desert in California to the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. It would take me four months. I’d grown up in the country, done a good amount of camping, and taken a few weekend backpacking trips, but I had a lot to learn: how, for example, to read a topographical map, ford a river, handle an ice ax, navigate using a compass, and avoid being struck by lightning. Everyone who knew me thought that I was nuts. I proceeded anyway, researching, reading maps, dehydrating food and packing it into plastic bags and then into boxes that would be mailed at roughly two-week intervals to the ranger stations and post offices I’d occasionally pass near.

I packed my possessions and stored them in my stepfather’s barn. I took off my wedding ring and put it into a small velvet box and moved my mother’s wedding ring from my right hand to my left. I was going to drive to Portland first and then leave my truck with a friend and fly to LA and take a bus to the start of the trail. I drove through the flatlands and Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota, positive that I’d made a vast mistake.

Deep in the night, I pulled into a small camping area in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and slept in the back of my truck. In the morning I climbed out to the sight of field of blue flowers that went right up to the Tongue River. I had the place to myself. It was spring and still cold, but I felt compelled anyway to go into the river. I decided I would perform something like a baptism to initiate this new part of my life. I took my clothes off and plunged in. The water was like ice, so cold it hurt. I dove under one time, two times, three times, then dashed out and dried off and dressed. As I walked back to my truck I noticed my hand: my mother’s wedding ring was gone.

At first I couldn’t believe it. I had believed that if I lost one thing, I would then be protected from losing another; that my mother’s death would inoculate me against further loss. It is an indefensible belief, but it was there, the same way I believed that if I endured long enough, my mother would be returned to me.

A ring is such a small thing, such a very small thing.

I went down on my hands and knees and searched for it. I patted every inch of ground where I had walked. I searched the back of my truck and my pockets, but I knew. I knew that the ring had come off in the river. Of course it had; what did I expect? I went to the edge of the water and thought about going back in, diving under again and again until I found it, but it was a useless idea, and I was defeated by it before I even began. I sat down on the edge of the water and cried. Tears, tears, so many kinds of tears, so many ways of crying. I had collected them, mastered them; I was a priestess, a virtuoso of crying.

I sat in the mud on the bank of the river for a long time and waited for the river to give the ring back to me. I waited and thought about everything. I thought about Mark and my boat of life. I thought what I would say to him then, now, forever: You, get in . I thought about the Formerly Gay Organic Farmer and the Quietly Perverse Poet and the Terribly Large Texas Bull Rider and the Five Line Cooks I Had on Separate Occasions over the Course of One Month. I thought about how I was never again going to sleep with anyone who had a title instead of a name. I was sick of it. Sick of fucking, of wanting to fuck the wrong people and not wanting to fuck the right ones. I thought about how if you lose a ring in a river, you are never going to get it back, no matter how badly you want it or how long you wait.

I leaned forward and put my hands into the water and held them flat and open beneath the surface. The soft current made rivulets over my bare fingers. I was no longer married to Mark. I was no longer married to my mother.

I was no longer married to my mother. I couldn’t believe that this thought had never occurred to me before: that it was her I’d been faithful to all along, and that I couldn’t be faithful any longer.

If this were fiction, what would happen next is that the woman would stand up and get into her truck and drive away. It wouldn’t matter that the woman had lost her mother’s wedding ring, even though it was gone to her forever, because the loss would mean something else entirely: that what was gone now was actually her sorrow and the shackles of grief that had held her down. And in this loss she would see, and the reader would know, that the woman had been in error all along. That, indeed, the love she’d had for her mother was too much love, really; too much love and also too much sorrow. She would realize this and get on with her life. There would be what happened in the story and also everything it stood for: the river, representing life’s constant changing; the tiny blue flowers, beauty; the spring air, rebirth. All of these symbols would collide and mean that the woman was actually lucky to have lost the ring, and not just to have lost it, but to have loved it, to have ached for it, and to have had it taken from her forever. The story would end, and you would know that she was the better for it. That she was wiser, stronger, more interesting, and, most of all, finally starting down her path to glory. I would show you the leaf when it unfurls in a single motion: the end of one thing, the beginning of another. And you would know the answers to all the questions without being told. Did she ever write that five-page paper about the guy who lost his nose? Did she ask Mark to marry her again? Did she stop sleeping with people who had titles instead of names? Did she manage to walk 1,638 miles? Did she get to work and become the Incredibly Talented and Extraordinarily Brilliant and Successful Writer? You’d believe the answers to all these questions to be yes. I would have given you what you wanted then: to be a witness to a healing.

But this isn’t fiction. Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about. Sometimes you wake up and find that you actually have lost your nose. Losing my mother’s wedding ring in the Tongue River was not OK . I did not feel better for it. It was not a passage or a release. What happened is that I lost my mother’s wedding ring and I understood that I was not going to get it back, that it would be yet another piece of my mother that I would not have for all the days of my life, and I understood that I could not bear this truth, but that I would have to.

Healing is a small and ordinary and very burnt thing. And it’s one thing and one thing only: it’s doing what you have to do. It’s what I did then and there. I stood up and got into my truck and drove away from a part of my mother. The part of her that had been my lover, my wife, my first love, my true love, the love of my life.

• Family and Relationships

Cheryl Strayed

Correspondence

Cheryl Strayed’s essay about her mother’s death [“ The Love of My Life ,” September 2002] reminded me of the death of my beloved grandmother in the midseventies.

The day of her funeral was breezy and sunny. The minister from the local funeral home, who clearly had never met my grandmother, delivered a canned eulogy. I wished that I could have spoken instead of him. As I stood by her grave and watched them lower in the coffin, I thought, There goes my little grandmother . And suddenly I wanted to throw myself on top of her coffin. I wanted to lie down in the dirt and pull my hair out and shriek. I wanted to make sounds I’d never made in my life, sounds I couldn’t even imagine.

Instead, in the reserved way of my family, I let the tears roll down my cheeks and sobbed only after I got into the car.

I don’t know why people think grief is supposed to end. Our culture wants us to follow a set of rules or take some kind of pill for grief and relabel it “depression.” But despair is not depression. The pills are useless when these feelings arise from real causes, not just a chemical imbalance in the brain. No one has a pill for grief. Grief simply has to be taken on its own terms and lived through. No one ever said that life was supposed to be painless or that we will know exactly how to deal with every feeling that comes our way. We do what we do, and sometimes we do very self-destructive things without understanding why.

Most of us just put one foot in front of the other and, somehow, we survive. But advice to “let it go” and “move on with your life” should be banned from polite conversation. Let go of the most important and powerful relationship in your life? Of course, one does move on, one way or another, but that doesn’t mean the grief is any less or the pain somehow magically cured. As Strayed says, life isn’t like fiction. Losing something priceless doesn’t make everything right again. One simply feels the grief less intensely as time passes. But the grief never really goes away.

In March I had to put down my thirteen-year-old dog because she had bone cancer. About two weeks later, I dreamed she was living in Ohio with my grandparents. She was three again, her best age. I hugged her and rubbed snow into her fur, telling her she was my “snow doggie.” When I woke up, I wanted to be with her more than anything. I wanted to be dead, because I know when I die I’ll be with my dog and my grandmother again, and I’ll be twelve years old, my best age. I can’t imagine anything more comforting. I miss my dog every day. I don’t want a new dog, a different dog; I want my Molly.

I have been a psychotherapist for more than twenty-six years, and I can confirm that Cheryl Strayed’s essay details the reality of grief, of our culture’s denial, and of true healing. “What does it mean to heal? To move on?” she writes. “It is usually said and not done, and the people who talk about it the most have almost never had to do it.”

It is horribly sad when psychotherapy gurus promote a coping strategy that denies us our grief and promotes the cultural mystification of it.

I will share Strayed’s essay with many of my clients in hopes that it will help them to face the real problem: that of refusal to see, to be aware, to experience life as it is.

Also In This Issue

September 2002.

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Love of My Life Analysis

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Looking at the essay, “The Love of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed

After losing her mother to cancer at the young age of twenty-two, Strayed struggles to grasp her new reality.  Constant reminders of her mother’s absence cause her to feel great pain, and yet, she puts significant effort into feeling hardly anything at all.  “We are not allowed this,” she says, “We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek , or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to ‘let go of,’ to ‘move on from,’ and we are told specifically how this should be done.”  Mourning feels as unnatural to her as it does to society, and even though her friends encourage her to go through the five steps (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), it only seems to heighten her anxiety.  The consolation she receives doesn’t seem to comfort her at all, as others try to relate to her loss.  She explains, “After my mother died, everyone I knew wanted to tell me either about the worst breakup they’d had or all the people they’d known who’d died. I listened to a long, traumatic story about a girlfriend who suddenly moved to Ohio, and to stories of grandfathers and old friends and people who lived down the block who were no longer among us. Rarely was this helpful.”  It is interesting to think that while one’s friends and family may try to relate with the best of intentions, comparing breakups to deeply impactful deaths hardly get to the magnitude of the experience.

Cheryl Strayed

By using sex as an outlet for her grief, she attempts to pacify it, which only exacerbates the main problem.  That is, she can’t accept that she can go on living without her mother.  She runs from emotional attachment, possibly as a way to protect herself.  “I did not deny,” she says, “I did not get angry. I didn’t bargain, become depressed, or accept. I fucked. I sucked… The people I messed around with did not have names; they had titles: the Prematurely Graying Wilderness Guide, the Technically Still a Virgin Mexican Teenager, the Formerly Gay Organic Farmer, the Quietly Perverse Poet, the Failing but Still Trying Massage Therapist, the Terribly Large Texas Bull Rider, the Recently Unemployed Graduate of Juilliard… With them, I was not in mourning; I wasn’t even me. I was happy and sexy and impetuous and fun. I was wild and enigmatic and terrifically good in bed.”

This brave confession raises a number of questions, perhaps the most implied being: why is it so awful to be sad?  Why should it be socially unacceptable to submit oneself entirely to their sadness and be absorbed by it?  Isn’t that required of us to move on?  And if we’ve already accepted that, that being deeply sad is a part of the process, why can’t we put it into practice?  Not to say that Strayed’s choices are the direct result of American culture’s expectations, but who’s to say they didn’t affect her at all?  Maybe it is time for us to ask these questions and take a hard look at how we want our relationship with loss to be.  The avoidance, the distaste for genuine sadness, the rejection of overwhelming emotions—these are the concerns Strayed points to in a direct and honest way that, like most of life’s challenges, provide more questions than answers.

To read Cheryl Strayed’s insightful essay, go to: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/321/the_love_of_my_life

And for more, check out her memoir, WILD , coming out in March 2012, http://www.cherylstrayed.com/works.htm

8 Responses to Looking at the essay, “The Love of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed

I was dumbfounded by this account of how Cheryl went through life following the death of her mother with her inability to cope. A brutally honest and unusual account, but who am I to judge. It certainly opens the door as to further conversations about what grieving is and the boundaries we accept or explore.

Report this comment

Yes I agree with the comment above – not the usual! Today certainly was a day of educational posts for me, especially given the amount I read on the topic.

Thanks Katie!

How can anyone condone such behavior because she lost her mother? This is inexcusable and a cop out as to some real problems this woman must have. Do you really think this is a good way to promote healthy healing through the act of cheating on a spouse. I would not label this as any form of healthy healing whatsoever!

If you read the essay, I think you’ll look at this issue differently. I don’t think she (or anyone for that matter) is condoning the behavior, she is just documenting her struggle with grief in a society where being sad isn’t really acceptable. I think it is a brave admission of a highly personal, human experience.

She is now a SWAMP DONKEY

Cheryl’s essay reads like a Shock Jock’s version of Eric Jong’s concept of the zipless fuck. Though Cheryl’s essay doesn’t have any profound significance for me, it was well written and entertaining.

Until you have walked a mile or hundreds of miles in Cheryl’s shoes or anyone else for that matter do not judge. We should not be so fast to talk down on another person. You are not God. We all deal with the death of a parent or family member or closes friends in different ways. No one is perfect. and if you say you are and that you don’t have skeletons in your closet your a lire. I myself can relate to losing touch with reality and doing things that was not good choices but what you learn from those bad choices and mistakes is not to make them again. My life was not prefect not even close to it growing up and i am a survivor of child molestation, being abuse as a child, to rape and domestic violence. Foster care, death of three daughters and that was natural births and it was nothing i did wrong, so people need to understand we are not saying what we did was right, when it came to dealing with these issues. we tell our story so maybe the next person does not do what we did.

Finally I feel that I am not alone in the world, that someone else has dealt with grief in the same way I am dealing with it. I have lost my mother, my father, my husband, and the man I felll in love with after my husband in the last 3 1/2 years (and no, I haven’t killed anyone! Three died from cancer, which was hell in and of itself, and one from a blood clot) . I went from a middle class soccer Mom who was faithful to her husband for 21 years to a raging slut within 4 months of my husband’s death. Just when I feel like I’m getting myself under control again, someone else seems to die. I am not trying to justify my behavior, I don’t necessarily want to act this way, and yet I do, because it makes me feel alive. It does help to know that other women have gone through it and, even though there are consequences to our actions, we survive and tell our stories to help the next woman. Thank you, Cheryl, for your vulnerability. It has given me hope!

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“The Love of My Life” by T. C. Boyle Critical Analysis

“ The Love of My Life” is a fictional story by T. C. Boyle, an American short story writer, and novelist. The narrative presents the dramatic events in the lives of the two young characters, China and Jeremy, whose irresponsible behavior forced them to make a cruel life-changing decision and question the meaning of love. The following paper will analyze the theme of the story, the symbol, and the literary theory that might be used to critically read the story and understand its meaning.

The contemporary fiction genre determines the story’s close connection to the modern world with its realistic characters and an approachable theme. Common themes in literature, such as love, death, or loss, allow the reader to learn more about human similarities despite cultural differences (Kusch, 2016). The story’s main theme is teenage love in the form of an infatuation, while true love requires responsibility. At the beginning of the literary work, the reader learns about Jeremy’s belief in eternal and unconditional love shared by his lover. The character often expressed his love for China by saying, “I love you,” and she would do the same, as “a hundred times a day she said it, too” (Boyle, 2000). While the characters were confident in the eternity of their love, their irresponsible behavior challenged the strength of their feelings when they learned about China’s pregnancy.

The high-school couple could not risk losing the comfort of their current lives or taking responsibility for their actions, so they decided to hide the pregnancy and then murder the baby. At this point in the plot, love cannot be viewed as unconditional or eternal as it starts to fade. Jeremy began to notice the faults in his lover’s character, whom he described as “stupid” and “spoiled by her parents and their standard of living” (Boyle, 2000). The story ends after China agrees to testify against her lover in court. The event signifies the decline of the loving relationship between the young characters, as China mentions in the final lines that Jeremy “ was the love of her life” (Boyle, 2000). Overall, the author questions the validity of teenage love by utilizing the theme that displays the transformation of the characters’ feelings from unconditional love to indifference caused by irresponsibility and guilt.

The main symbol in the literary work is a tree that transforms its appearance across different settings throughout the story depending on the situation or the period in the characters’ lives. According to Kusch (2016), symbols “create a shorthand for referring to the larger concept” and “translate that concept into a tangible object” (p. 48). Thus, the tree might be viewed as a symbolic tree of life representing the characters’ personal development based on a series of life-changing decisions. The story begins with the description of the trees covered in ice, which might be interpreted as a calm, stable, and dormant period in the story without any dramatic events or changes.

The next symbolic setting was in early spring, when the leaves on trees turned green too early, which might be a reference to China and Jeremy’s premature introduction to adulthood and future parenthood. The street was decorated with blossoms of “fruit trees in the development” when Jeremy told his lover to relax and “experience” life (Boyle, 2000). Along with the green color’s symbolic meaning of fertility, the blossoming trees symbolize the beginning of the new life signifying the downfall of the young lovers caused by their immaturity and lack of responsibility.

The story might be read using the literary theory of formalism, which emphasizes the role of the form and literary devices in the text. The interpretive approach concentrates on the objective analysis of the literary devices, as the Formalists deny the importance of cultural context and the author’s personal or professional background (Brewton, 2020). Since the story is rich in literary devices, such as foreshadowing and the aforementioned symbolism, the analysis of its form might help the reader to understand the author’s intent and the meaning of the work. For example, while watching a horror movie, Jeremy said that “teens have sex, and then they pay for it in body parts” (Boyle, 2000). Jeremy’s words serve as a reference for future events crucial for the development of the theme and might teach the reader about the consequences of irresponsibility. Thus, the formalistic approach allows the reader to detect the foreshadowing at the beginning of the story, which gives some hints about China’s pregnancy and the attempts to get rid of the baby.

“The Love of My Life ,” the title and reoccurring phrase in the story, is a serious statement that contrasts with the author’s choice of immature characters, whose actions express infatuation rather than love. Focusing on formal aspects of the literary work, such as the repetition of a particular phrase, helps the reader to understand the moral or social mission of the author (Bertens, 2017). As the characters are still alive, the choice of past tense in the phrase “he was the love of her life” does not make sense (Boyle, 2000). It possibly translates the author’s message reminding the reader that promises of eternal love are meaningless without responsibility. Overall, critical reading using a formalistic approach and the analysis of the theme and the symbol of the story facilitated the understanding of the story’s meaning and the author’s moral message.

Bertens, H. (2017). Literary theory: The basics (3 rd ed.). Taylor & Francis.

Boyle, T. C. (2000). The love of my life. The New Yorker . Web.

Brewton, W. (2020). Literary theory . Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web.

Kusch, C. (2016). Literary analysis: The basics . Routledge.

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The Love of My Life

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Summary and Study Guide

The Love of My Life is a novel by bestselling novelist Rosie Walsh. The book, published by Viking in March 2022, is a romantic mystery that follows the story of Leo Philber and his wife, Emma Bigelow. After the traumatic experience of cancer treatment, Leo sets out to write an obituary about his wife, only to realize there are things about her he doesn’t know. As secrets are slowly revealed, Leo is both frustrated by the lies his wife told and amazed by the strength with which she endured a series of personal tragedies. The Love of My Life was first published in Germany, where it spent several weeks at the top of the bestseller list.

This guide refers to the 2022 Viking Kindle e-book edition.

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Emma Bigelow has completed chemotherapy and is awaiting the results of her latest scans. Her husband, Leo Philber, is an obituary writer for a local paper. He has been writing her obituary to cope with her illness. After her scans show that Emma is in remission, Leo’s boss asks him to finish the obituary for their files in the event it should be necessary in the future. As Leo begins writing the piece, he realizes there are things he does not know about Emma, such as the cause of her mother’s death. Leo begins looking closer at paperwork and pictures in his home, leading him to discover his wife did not graduate from the university he thought she had.

Leo and Emma first meet at the funeral of Emma’s grandmother, a groundbreaking female Member of Parliament (MP). They hit it off and quickly begin dating. Not long after, Leo accidentally discovers that he was adopted when he finds some paperwork at his parents’ home. This causes a significant change in his relationship with his parents and makes Emma hesitant about revealing a secret she holds from Leo. It also causes Emma to lie to Leo about her meeting with Jeremy Rothschild .

Janice Rothschild , a well-known actress, has disappeared. Leo’s coworker, Sheila, is a friend of the Rothschilds, and she asks Leo probing questions about Emma that lead him to believe she knows something about Emma that he does not. Leo looks at Emma’s computer, emails, and text messages and discovers several messages between Emma and Jeremy, Janice’s husband.

Emma meets with Jeremy and learns that Janice wrote her a letter referencing a time when Emma and Janice were friendly and they came upon a crab carcass that might have been important to Emma’s work as a marine ecologist. Janice mentions the crab , but the letter is confusing and does not make much sense. Jeremy hoped it would give a clue to Janice’s whereabouts, but it does not.

After this meeting, Emma struggles to cut off contact with Jeremy. She writes a text message to him referencing his role as her child’s father that Leo accidentally sees. He jumps to the conclusion that his child with Emma is not his, and he leaves without giving Emma a chance to explain. When he finally returns home, open to an explanation, Emma does not show up. Worried, Leo turns to Jeremy for answers.

Jeremy explains to Leo that Emma became pregnant at university by Jeremy’s cousin, David. She turned to Jeremy because David was married. Jeremy and Janice offered to adopt Emma’s baby, and she initially agreed but changed her mind. After the baby’s birth, Emma experienced postpartum psychosis. Emma was treated in a hospital, and Janice began visiting. On one visit, Janice raised the alarm, claiming Emma was attempting to suffocate the baby. Shaken by this accusation, Emma once again asks Janice and Jeremy to adopt her baby.

After the adoption becomes final, Emma begins stalking the Rothschilds, trying to get a look at her growing child. One episode saw the child running up to Emma. She hugged him but walked away before anything else happened. However, Jeremy caught her leaving, and she was arrested for attempted kidnapping.

Leo is shocked to hear this story that Emma never told him. Shortly after, he learns where Emma is. She spent the day at her friend Jill’s where she met her now grown son, Charlie. Charlie has known about Emma all his life and has reached out to her now hoping to gain information about his mother’s disappearance. Emma has no answers for him.

Leo retrieves Emma, bringing her home. Charlie arrives at their home and reveals to Emma that Janice lied about the suffocation episode. The guilt of this lie has weighed on Janice, which is why she has disappeared. Emma has an idea about where Janice might have gone and takes Charlie there. She finds Janice with Leo’s help. Leo and Emma work out their differences and renew their wedding vows, and Emma begins building a relationship with Charlie.

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Essays About Life: Top 5 Examples Plus 7 Prompts

Life envelops various meanings; if you are writing essays about life, discover our comprehensive guide with examples and prompts to help you with your essay.

What is life? You can ask anyone; I assure you, no two people will have the same answer. How we define life relies on our beliefs and priorities. One can say that life is the capacity for growth or the time between birth and death. Others can share that life is the constant pursuit of purpose and fulfillment. Life is a broad topic that inspires scholars, poets, and many others. It stimulates discussions that encourage diverse perspectives and interpretations. 

5 Essay Examples

1. essay on life by anonymous on toppr.com, 2. the theme of life, existence and consciousness by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. compassion can save life by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. a life of consumption vs. a life of self-realization by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. you only live once: a motto for life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is the true meaning of life, 2. my life purpose, 3. what makes life special, 4. how to appreciate life, 5. books about life, 6. how to live a healthy life, 7. my idea of a perfect life.

“…quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.”

The author defines life as something that differentiates man from inorganic matter. It’s an aspect that processes and examines a person’s actions that develop through growth. For some, life is a pain because of failures and struggles, but it’s temporary. For the writer, life’s challenges help us move forward, be strong, and live to the fullest. You can also check out these essays about utopia .

“… Kafka defines the dangers of depending on art for life. The hunger artist expresses his dissatisfaction with the world by using himself and not an external canvas to create his artwork, forcing a lack of separation between the artist and his art. Therefore, instead of the art depending on the audience, the artist depends on the audience, meaning when the audience’s appreciation for work dwindles, their appreciation for the artist diminishes as well, leading to the hunger artist’s death.”

The essay talks about “ A Hunger Artist ” by Franz Kafka, who describes his views on life through art. The author analyzes Kafka’s fictional main character and his anxieties and frustrations about life and the world. This perception shows how much he suffered as an artist and how unhappy he was. Through the essay, the writer effectively explains Kafka’s conclusion that artists’ survival should not depend on their art.

“Compassion is that feeling that we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. When we know that there is someone that really cares for us. Compassion comes from that moment when we can see the world through another person’s eyes.”

The author is a nurse who believes that to be professional, they need to be compassionate and treat their patients with respect, empathy, and dignity. One can show compassion through small actions such as talking and listening to patients’ grievances. In conclusion, compassion can save a person’s life by accepting everyone regardless of race, gender, etc.

“… A life of self-realization is more preferable and beneficial in comparison with a life on consumption. At the same time, this statement may be objected as person’s consumption leads to his or her happiness.”

The author examines Jon Elster’s theory to find out what makes a person happy and what people should think and feel about their material belongings. The essay mentions a list of common activities that make us feel happy and satisfied, such as buying new things. The writer explains that Elster’s statement about the prevalence of self-realization in consumption will always trigger intense debate.

“Appreciate the moment you’ve been given and appreciate the people you’ve been given to spend it with, because no matter how beautiful or tragic a moment is, it always ends. So hold on a little tighter, smile a little bigger, cry a little harder, laugh a little louder, forgive a little quicker, and love a whole lot deeper because these are the moments you will remember when you’re old and wishing you could rewind time.”

This essay explains that some things and events only happen once in a person’s life. The author encourages teenagers to enjoy the little things in their life and do what they love as much as they can. When they turn into adults, they will no longer have the luxury to do whatever they want.

The author suggests doing something meaningful as a stress reliever, trusting people, refusing to give up on the things that make you happy, and dying with beautiful memories. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

7 Prompts for Essays About Life

Life encompasses many values and depends on one’s perception. For most, life is about reaching achievements to make themselves feel alive. Use this prompt to compile different meanings of life and provide a background on why a person defines life as they do.

Take Joseph Campbell’s, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning, and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer,” for example. This quote pertains to his belief that an individual is responsible for giving life meaning. 

For this prompt, share with your readers your current purpose in life. It can be as simple as helping your siblings graduate or something grand, such as changing a national law to make a better world. You can ask others about their life purpose to include in your essay and give your opinion on why your answers are different or similar.

Life is a fascinating subject, as each person has a unique concept. How someone lives depends on many factors, such as opportunities, upbringing, and philosophies. All of these elements affect what we consider “special.”

Share what you think makes life special. For instance, talk about your relationships, such as your close-knit family or best friends. Write about the times when you thought life was worth living. You might also be interested in these essays about yourself .

Life in itself is a gift. However, most of us follow a routine of “wake up, work (or study), sleep, repeat.” Our constant need to survive makes us take things for granted. When we endlessly repeat a routine, life becomes mundane. For this prompt, offer tips on how to avoid a monotonous life, such as keeping a gratitude journal or traveling.

Many literary pieces use life as their subject. If you have a favorite book about life, recommend it to your readers by summarizing the content and sharing how the book influenced your outlook on life. You can suggest more than one book and explain why everyone should read them.

For example, Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” reminds its readers to live in the moment and never fear failure.

To be healthy doesn’t only pertain to our physical condition. It also refers to our mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being. To live a happy and full life, individuals must strive to be healthy in all areas. For this prompt, list ways to achieve a healthy life. Section your essay and present activities to improve health, such as eating healthy foods, talking with friends, etc.

No one has a perfect life, but describe what it’ll be like if you do. Start with the material things, such as your house, clothes, etc. Then, move to how you connect with others. In your conclusion, answer whether you’re willing to exchange your current life for the “perfect life” you described and why.  See our essay writing tips to learn more!

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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My Life Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

Life is the state of being alive and the experience of living. It is a characteristic that distinguishes physical entities with biological processes, such as growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli, from those without such processes. Life is a complex and diverse phenomenon that encompasses a wide range of forms and functions. Life can be found in every corner of the earth, from the tiniest microorganisms to the largest animals. It is a precious and fragile thing, and scientists continue to study and understand more about the intricacies of life every day.

100 Words on My Life Essay

200 words on my life essay, 500 words on my life essay.

My life has been a journey of growth and learning. From a young age, I have always been curious and eager to explore the world around me. I have had many experiences that have shaped who I am today. Growing up in a small town gave me a sense of community and belonging while also allowing me to develop a love for nature and the outdoors.

My education has also played a significant role in shaping my life. I have always been a dedicated student and have worked hard to achieve my goals. I have learned valuable lessons about perseverance and determination, and I have been able to apply these lessons to other areas of my life.

My life has been a journey full of ups and downs, but overall it has been a fulfilling and meaningful experience.

Routine of My Daily Life

I am a student, and I have always been passionate about learning. My daily routine starts with waking up early in the morning, and I usually wake up at 6 am. I get dressed and have my breakfast, which generally includes cereal or toast with some fruit. After breakfast, I spend some time reviewing my notes and studying for my upcoming exams.

I then head off to school, where I spend most of my day attending classes and participating in various activities. I am involved in several extracurricular activities, such as sports, debate teams and volunteering which keeps me busy and active. After school, I come back home and spend some time doing my homework and finishing any pending assignments.

Overall, my life is filled with a balance of work and play. I am always busy, but I make sure to make time for the things that matter most to me. I believe that life is about making the most of every opportunity and making the most of every moment. I am grateful for the experiences that I have had, and I am excited about the future.

Life is a journey full of ups and downs, opportunities, and challenges. It is unique for everyone and it is something that we all have to experience on our own. As a student, my life is currently focused on school and my future aspirations. There have been some important moments in my life that I will always remember, and I am always looking for ways to improve my life.

Memorable Life Experiences

One of the most important moments in my life was when I received my first acceptance letter from a university. It was a moment of pride and accomplishment, and it made me feel like all of my hard work had finally paid off. This moment inspired me to work even harder and to strive for success in all of my future endeavours.

Another important moment that made me incredibly proud was when I received the first prize in an inter-school science competition. I had been working on my project for months, conducting experiments, analysing data, and perfecting my presentation. The competition was fierce, with students from all over the city presenting their projects.

How I Felt | When my name was called as the winner, I was overwhelmed with emotion. All of my hard work and dedication had paid off, and I was being recognized for my achievements. The audience erupted into applause, and I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment that I will never forget.

Despite these positive moments, there have also been challenges that I have had to face. One of the biggest challenges I have faced is balancing my schoolwork and extracurricular activities. It can be difficult to find the time to study, participate in sports and clubs, and still have time for my friends and family. However, I have learned that time management and prioritisation are important skills to have, and I am always working to improve in these areas.

Moving forward, I have many aspirations for my future. I hope to continue my education and obtain a degree in a field that I am passionate about. I also want to travel the world and experience different cultures, and to use my education and skills to make a positive impact on others.

Volunteer Activities

I have also been involved in several volunteer activities, and I have found them to be incredibly rewarding. I have volunteered for various causes, such as helping out at homeless shelters and working with underprivileged children. It has given me a sense of purpose, and it has made me realise the importance of giving back to society.

In order to achieve my goals, I know that I need to continue to work hard and to be proactive. I want to stay focused and determined, and to never give up on my dreams. I also want to continue to learn and grow, and to always be open to new opportunities and experiences.

My life has been a journey that has been full of memorable experiences. I have had my fair share of ups and downs, but I have learned to appreciate and make the most of every moment. I am grateful for the people in my life, and I am excited to see what the future holds.

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Guest Essay

Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life

By Glynnis MacNicol

Ms. MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.

If that’s the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.

It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I’ve discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.

Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.

Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.

It is disconcerting to enjoy oneself so much when there is so much to assure you to expect the opposite, just as it is strange to feel so good against a backdrop of so much terribleness in the world. But with age (hopefully) comes clarity.

Fifty is a milestone. And the fact my 50th birthday lands on or around some other significant 50ths has brought some things into focus. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This year is the 50th of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which may be less well known but remains significant: It allowed women for the first time to have bank accounts and credit cards in their own name, not needing a male signature.

That my birth date landed between the passing of these two landmark laws makes it easier for me to see that the life I’m living is a result of women having authority over both their bodies and their finances. I represent a cohort of women who lead lives that do not require us to ask permission or seek approval. I have availed myself of all the choices available to me, and while the results come with their own set of risks, they have been enormously satisfying.

The timing of my birthday also helps me see the violent rollback of women’s rights happening right now as a response to the independence these legal rights afforded women. Forget about the horror of being alone and middle-aged — there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who is free. That she might be having a better time without permission or supervision is downright insufferable.

My entry into middle age certainly had the makings of an unpleasant story.

Like many, I spent the early months of the pandemic by myself. It was the type of solitary confinement that popular science, and certain men with platforms, enjoy reminding us will be the terrible future that awaits a woman who remains single for too long. I went untouched by anyone. Unsmelled, too, which you might think is a strange thing to note, but it’s an even stranger thing to experience. Unseen except by the building exterminator and the remaining doormen of the Upper West Side who gave distant friendly greetings on my evening walks around Covid-empty New York.

Alone, unmarried, childless, past my so-called prime. A caricature, culture would have it, a fringe identity; a tragedy or a punchline, depending on your preference. At the very least a cautionary tale.

By August 2021, I was desperate — not for partnership but for connection. I bought a ticket to Paris, a place where I’d spent much of my free time before the pandemic and where I had a group of friends.

Paris, I reminded myself, prioritizes pleasure. I dived in. Cheese, wine, friendships, sex — and repeat.

At first it was shocking. I was ill prepared to get what I wanted, what it seemed I had summoned. There were moments when I wondered whether I should be ashamed. I had also never felt so free and so fully myself. I felt no shame or guilt, only the thrill that came with the knowledge I was exercising my freedom.

These days, generally speaking, there is little in cinema or literature, let alone the online world, to suggest that when you are a woman alone (forget about a middle-aged woman), things will go your way, as I have often experienced.

There have been better times. In the 1980s, sitcoms were stacked with starring women for whom men were a minor-character concern — “Designing Women,” “Murphy Brown,” “The Golden Girls” — all of which, if they premiered today (and that’s a big if), would feel radical. Later there was “Girlfriends.” Even “Sex and the City,” with its often regressive marriage plotting, remains surprisingly modern in its depictions of adult friendship and sexual mores. In each case, just as it looked as if these narratives might begin to fully take root in the real world, the women largely went back inside (or into body bags, in the case of many “Law & Order” plotlines). By the early aughts we were housewives again, real and imagined.

I suspect that a lot of this backlash is connected to the terror that men experienced at discovering that they are less necessary to women’s fulfillment than centuries of laws and stories have allowed them to believe. That terror is abundantly apparent today: From Harrison Butker’s commencement speech suggesting that women may find more fulfillment in marriage and children than in having a career, to the Supreme Court once again debating access to abortion to the push to roll back no-fault divorce laws: All are efforts to return women to a place where others can manage their access to … well, just about everything.

It’s in this light that my enjoyment begins to feel radical. Come fly with me. There’s no fear here.

Glynnis MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Laura Jarrett reveals what it was like to read Trump’s historic verdict on live TV

NBC News senior legal correspondent Laura Jarrett thrives under pressure. So Jarrett was ready to go the afternoon of May 30, when a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie and Nightly News’ Lester Holt were delivering a special report, when suddenly Jarrett’s voice could heard in the background. It was urgent.

“Guys! We need to go,” Jarrett said. “We need to go.”

“Go,” Savannah said. 

The cameras then turned to Jarrett, who read off each count, one by one. Trump became the first former United States president to be convicted of felony crimes.

It’s moments like this that inspired Jarrett to leave her career practicing law to become a legal analyst on TV. 

“I’ve always loved putting the puzzle pieces together and figuring out how to tell a complicated story in the most straightforward and compelling way as possible,” Jarrett previously told TODAY.com . 

Here, Jarrett recounts what was going through her mind at that historic moment. 

“IN THIS MOMENT , my thoughts were this: Be calm. Play it straight. You know this case. Those of us who cover high profile legal cases are used to pressure.

But 5:00 p.m. on Thursday — when former President Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of felony crimes — was next level. I went to law school, I clerked for judges, I practiced law, and I gave it all up — for this. This was the moment that sealed that I made the right choice.

I thought carefully about my dress, and more importantly — sneakers! I knew it could be a long day, but the bathroom situation when waiting outside of court is always tricky. Turns out when you are reading ‘guilty’ on live television 34 times with millions watching, you forget you sort of needed to pee.  

As I looked at the first ‘G’ for count of the jury’s verdict on our Google spreadsheet entered by our intrepid correspondent in the courtroom, Tom Winter, I felt eerily relaxed. But then you realize, you have 33 more to go! So I just kept going. We had a plan. And I love a plan. So I kept at it.

I haven’t seen my two young children in days. But on Friday morning, for the first time in weeks, I will walk my son to school. His very last day of pre-school. Because he has his mama back.”

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Why Am I Obsessed With Sitting in My Car For Long Periods of Time?

There's something therapeutic about sitting in my car. When inside, I'm taken to a place where reality doesn't exist: I can simply detach from the constant demands of everyday life by staring blankly at my dashboard, exploring a random passing thought like, "Wait, do vaginas have protein ?"

In these moments parked in the driveway, I find clarity and peace. It's like self-care without the meditation apps and celery juice . I can simply exist without the ping of a Slack notification, spend some time daydreaming about what it would be like to be a coastal grandma , and mentally reset before checking my bank account.

The solitude I find in my car isn't exclusively my own experience, though. Not only are there multiple Reddit threads on the subject, but TikTok creators have also shared videos on the same sentiment. Some people simply enjoy the peace and quiet it brings, while others use their car to process their emotions or feelings.

"Sitting in your car serves as a transitional space — a haven that exists between the outside world and home," psychotherapist Jessica Hunt says. "It's a moment to decompress, process the day, and mentally prepare for what's next." Below, Hunt explains more about why so many people find comfort in the car.

Experts Featured in This Article

Jessica Hunt , LCSW, is a California-based psychotherapist specializing in anxiety, relationships, identity, and life transitions.

Why Do I Love Sitting In My Car?

One reason why you may enjoy sitting in your car is because it feels like a personal bubble. "It's a small, controlled environment where you can relax without interruption, which provides a sense of safety and control," Hunt says. "This is a very comforting escape from the stresses of daily life — even if it's temporary."

In the same way people may decompress by painting, working out, reading a book, or going on a hot girl walk , a moment of solitude in the car could have the same effect — especially for people with children, who may feel like they don't often have alone time. The time in the car may be a rare opportunity for a break from any and all responsibilities or stresses.

On a psychological level, decompressing in your car could be related to the concept of "transition time" or "micro breaks," Hunt says. "These are moments that help us shift from one part of our day to another, allowing us to reset and recharge mentally."

Personally, I like to sit in my car following a workout class. Of course, this may be because I'm tired and the mere thought of moving my hands to start the car seems like too much work. But it's also because it helps me come down from my workout and prepare myself for what the rest of the day has in store.

Either way, it's not a bad thing to use your car as a mobile sanctuary. (It's cheaper than a massage or a flight to Greece, after all.) But if you find yourself needing these moments frequently, "it might be a sign that you need more intentional downtime or stress management in your routine," Hunt says.

"Listen to the cues and explore how you can incorporate more relaxation and moments to recharge throughout your day," she adds. Until then, you can find me in my car.

Taylor Andrews is a Balance editor at PS who specializes in topics relating to sex, relationships, dating, sexual health, mental health, and more. In her six years working in editorial, she's written about how semen is digested, why sex aftercare is the move, and how the overturn of Roe killed situationships.

• Personal Essay

Interview with Rachel Nadon, CIRM's BMO 2024 postdoctoral fellow

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Big Spring for Rachel Nadon! On April 2nd, she began her tenure as the  BMO Posdoctoral Fellow at CIRM for the year 2024 , and on July 1st, she will take up her new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Québec Literature in the Département de littérature, théâtre et cinéma at Université Laval!  Despite her short stay with us, we are eager to find out more about her fascinating research project, which she hopes to pursue as a professor.

But first and foremost, a brief biography is in order. With a PhD in French-language literatures from Université de Montréal, Rachel Nadon works on the relationship between emotions and the sensational press. Member of the Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec (GRÉLQ) , she works at the crossroads of cultural studies and literary history. She co-edited the collective Relire les revues québécoises : histoire, formes et pratiques (PUM, 2021). She is also director of Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle .

Her research project as a BMO Postdoctoral Fellow, which she plans to pursue,  is “Emotions and archives of feelings: reading Montreal through Allô Police, 1970-2004”.

The question on everyone's mind: why Allô Police?

I've already been working on yellow newspapers for a few years ("yellow newspapers", just to get everyone on the same wavelength, is an expression that includes all sorts of different newspapers, crime papers, gossip papers, saucy cartoon papers, etc.). These are newspapers that are often ephemeral, that don't last long and whose circulation is difficult to evaluate. Allô Police had a very long life, from 1953 to 2004. It also had a huge circulation, between 100,000 and 200,000 copies a week in the 1950s. So, on the one hand, there's the duration and popularity of this newspaper.

And on the other, I have noticed that everyone has one or more anecdotes about Allô Police. When I was a kid, my parents used to cover my eyes a little when we passed the Allô Police in the convenience store! But just about everyone has something to say about Allô Police: reading it only on vacations (like a little party), cutting it up for scrapbooking, reading it on the sly, despite parental prohibitions, etc. It is this conjecture of two elements that intrigues me: its popularity, the widespread yet almost intimate nature of its reading. Although few people mention Allô Police as a legitimate reading habit...

What motivates you to study the relationship between emotions and the sensational press?

When I started reading Allô Police, I realized that emotion was quite important in my reading. I was confronted with articles about mutilated and decapitated people; there were lots of photos of corpses. Itis something that really grabbed me, and which seems to me to go beyond the notion of sensationalism. Starting from my emotions of fascination and disgust, and perplexity too, I came to pay attention to the texts, to the way emotions like fear, disgust, even love, were named. I realized that all this, the mobilization of emotion in different ways, was part of the reading pact of these newspapers. I should point out that my reading emotions are probably not the same as those of another readership, that of the 1950s for example; I cannot assume that, at least!

What are your goals and expectations for your residency as a postdoctoral fellow at CRIEM?

The project is structured in two parts. First, I will be reading copies of Allô Police from the 1976 Olympics to the end of the newspaper's activities in 2004. I'm particularly interested in the 1980s and 1990s, because I want to see how the paper stages the city. For example, what neighborhoods are named, what events are covered? Does it resemble the years I've already studied (the 1950s-1960s)? I will be able to pursue these questions, analyzing the ways in which the city of Montréal is constructed over the course of the articles. I am also going to see how a newspaper like Allô Police situates itself in relation to the pro-sex and anti-sex feminist movements, and everything to do with pornography and sex work. As it's a newspaper that makes a living out of sexuality and its particular circles, I'm interested.

There's a second aspect to the project, that of archives. I want to explore people's memories of this diary, with the idea of reconstructing an archive of readings, or rather an "archive of feelings", to use Ann Czetkovich 's words. The aim is to seek out stories, objects of all kinds, business cards, photocopied editions, photos, scrapbook pages made from Allô Police clippings, etc. This will be a good way to reflect on the different uses of the newspaper and the ways in which people interacted with Allô Police, but also on the memories they retain of it and what it tells us about a way of living in or representing Montréal. It goes beyond a simple "broadcast-reception" type of reading, I want to touch on the uses of the newspaper and its ways of circulating, and of "orienting" us in the city.

Can you explain the concept of the archive of feelings?

Ann Czetkovich is interested in the experience of trauma among lesbian and queer people. According to her, this experience isn't "officially" documented, but is associated with objects or narratives. These objects - it could be a diary or pulp collections - are not necessarily linked to the experience of trauma, but evoke it in different ways for someone or for a community. These objects, figures or photos (for example), are invested with sentimental value and meaning, but they are not considered archives in the institutional sense of the term. Ann Czetkovich, in her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , analyzes these archives and "produces" them, too. There is a double movement of analysis and creation (she "constitutes" cultural productions as archives, so to speak), and that is what I want to do too. Does the experience of emotionally reading a newspaper like Allô Police produce an archive of feelings? I would like to collect objects and stories that would enable us to reflect on the relationship between emotions, memory and the city.

This implies creative work.

For the project, I'd like to set up a website, collect alternative archives of Allô Police, meet people who still remember it, and explore different modes of distribution, such as fanzines. I have co-written a "detective serial" in the cultural magazine Liberté, in which I've used the device of fiction to integrate interviews I have already done with Allô Police actors. I'm also thinking of organizing a round-table discussion on the 20th anniversary of Allô Police's demise.

For me, in this project, there is a dimension of research and creation in the strict sense, i.e. reading and research on the one hand, and "reconstituting" the archives on the other. More broadly, it allows me to reflect on the question of archives, which is a complicated one when it comes to large-scale cultural productions. The documents that bear witness to the production of these periodicals are often not intended for conservation or archiving. In fact, the product itself - the newspaper - was never intended for preservation!

Why is it important to study a crime news journal like Allô Police?

On the one hand, it is a place of memory, in the sense of a space of memory that bears witness to many events affecting Montreal and many other places. This place of memory allows us to read the watermark of changes affecting society, but also relationships between people, the way we conceive of crime and criminals. In short, it allows us to reflect on what affects people, and what constitutes an era. And at the same time, it is a place of memory in the most fundamental sense: people remember it. Many readers meet there. It's important to highlight how a newspaper that has had bad press has brought together a community of readers, a community that could be reconstituted by, among other things, the very diverse uses to which this newspaper has been put.

What are your plans for your first months (or rather first years!) as an assistant professor of Québec literature?

One thing is for sure: I want to pursue this project! It is very close to my heart. I am interested in pursuing all these reflections on how a tabloid newspaper like Allô Police has left an emotional, concrete and material mark on people's lives and on the city of Montréal. More broadly, I have a project on the cultural history of bad taste in Québec; to be continued, as they say!

A perfect day in Montréal? It's summer, I get on my bike, I go swimming in Parc Jarry, I have a coffee in the Mile End and we eat hot dogs at Orange Julep..   3 essential symbols of Montréal? Olympic Stadium, Caffè Italia and Milano (together), and the Lachine Canal   Favorite neighborhood? My neighborhood, Little Italy, because of my neighbors!   Bibliography on emotions and cultural & literary studies: Sara Ahmed (2014), Cultural Politics of Emotion , Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,2 nd ed., 256 p. Ann Czetkovich (2003), An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , Duke University Press, 368 p. Michel de Certeau (1990), L’invention du quotidien, tome 1 : Arts de faire , Folio, 416 p. Richard Hoggart (1970), La Culture du pauvre , trad. de l’anglais par Jean Claude Passeron, Paris, Minuit, 420 p. Will Straw (2021), «The Pastness of Allo Police» , dans Martha Langford et Johanne Sloan (ed.), Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City, Montréal, McGill/Queen’s University Press, p. 199-216.

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