Painting by Miriam Zora Engel (author’s daughter)“Do you know what dust is?” my twelve-year-old daughter asks, looking...

The thing I remember most about dying, is how much it burns.

My mother did not want seven children. She birthed me at the age of seventeen, her high school diploma incomplete, her...

My first canvas hangs on the wall of my art studio in Waltham, MA. It is an abstract landscape of blues, browns, and purples, evoking mountains, lakes, and volcanoes.

1. One of us thinks too little about weight. One of us thinks too much. She is all angles, like the drawings of women in pattern catalogs at the fabric store. I am all rounded: my chin, my stomach, my upper arms like still life paintings of plump, ripe fruit.

We are everywhere, the middle-aged, aging daughters and sons. Watch us folding walkers and wheelchairs into trunks, and then unfolding them again in handicapped spaces or next to sidewalk cutouts

I could only love you the same way our mother loved chicken feet.

We weren’t rich, but our grandparents raised chickens and mother could make one bird go a long way for a family of four …

Isn’t good old-fashioned grief enough? Loss, tears, the flooding of memories?

C-sharp (#): Compositions in a minor scale, such as Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata in C# Minor,” can evoke a misty evening of sad contemplation, moody ruminations, even grief.