Our Cat has Nine Lives
Recently, I had the uncanny experience of sending a friend of Caitlin’s a rare gift – a baby present that Caitlin had purchased in Bruges in 2011, in the event that this friend ever had a little boy. Mieke recently gave birth to a son and what a pleasure, to send that tiny Dutch knitted […]
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It’s a wondrous thing to create a child, send her out into the world, and see what happens. Caitlin’s life influenced many others and over the years, especially the last few, it’s been heartening to learn how. One friend from her high school days is an artist and a few months ago, told me she […]
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This morning, Nick and I were talking about the fact that some people seem to be afraid to read Little Matches when a friend sent me a message: I hadn’t yet started LITTLE MATCHES because a friend’s son is dying of cancer, and I didn’t think I had the emotional capacity. Last night, however, your […]
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I asked some of Caitlin’s friends if they would want to write up a little something that I could put on my website. Here, Kenley describes Caitlin as only a lifelong best friend from childhood can. Someone recently asked me how I thought Caitlin might feel about Little Matches being out in the world. I […]
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Three years ago right now I was in Italy at a literary workshop. I had 25 pages of Little Matches written but I still I had no idea whether it would ever become a book. When I arrived home, I resumed my practice of setting a timer every day and sitting down to write “no […]
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Update needed, as Caitlin would say. Three years ago today, on the 9-month anniversary of her lung transplant, during a walk around Walden Pond, I decided to start writing what I called “the Caitlin book.” I wasn’t even sure what kind of book it would be, or if I could manage to write it, but […]
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Over the course of writing my book these past two years, I asked the question that a lot of grieving people ask: “Does consciousness survive death?” It’s a question with no definitive answers, but what has really stood out to me is just how much research has been done by people of science. One book that […]
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When I was pregnant and my baby was due mid-summer, I wanted a July baby. July seemed to be a vibrant month: warm, lush, expectant! August seemed so enervating–I associated it with long, bored days of childhood, when all I seemed to do was lie about on stiff, dried-out grass, listening to the drone of […]
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1. The New York Times just published an article about experimental phage therapy and Mallory Smith’s SALT IN MY SOUL. It is bittersweet, indeed, to know that phage therapy, administered early enough, might have done so much to prevent Mallory and Caitlin and and others from even needing transplants, but other people are already benefiting from […]
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Today, Nick and I are on our way to………Pittsburgh. Yes. But first, yesterday. Yesterday, Jess, Nick and I had grandstand viewing passes at the Boston Marathon Finish Line. We cheered the finishers along with a mother and her two adult daughters–BAA volunteers–who fell in love with Jess. When Jess said she wanted to try to […]
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9LivesNotes 