Beautiful Boy

I cannot believe that this is my life.

van Gogh asserted, 'Sorrow is better than joy

It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.

How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.

Fortunately there is a beautiful boy.

Unfortunately he has a terrible disease.

Fortunately there is love and joy.

Unfortunately there is pain and misery.

Fortunately the story is not over.

The jet pulls away from the gate.

I hang up the phone.

trying the same thing and expecting different results is the height of insanity

There's nothing to be done

It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people.

relapse is part of recovery.

I look over at him, look deeply into his impassive face. Nic has many of his mother's handsome features. Like her, he is tall and thin and has her fine nose and lips. He had her fair hair before it darkened as he grew up. Even so, sometimes I have looked at his face and it was as if I were peering in a mirror. It was not only the physical similarities that I would see. I saw myself hidden in his eyes, in his expressions. It would startle me. Maybe all children as they grow up take on their parents' traits and mannerisms and become more like them. I see my father in me now in ways that I never did when I was young. In the car, however, I see a stranger. And yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately. I recall his soft eyes when they were elated and when they were disappointed, his face when he was pallid from illness and when he was burned red by the sun, his mouth and even each tooth from visits to dentists and the orthodontist, his knees from when he skinned them and I put on Band-Aids, his shoulders from putting on sun block, his feet from taking out splinters—every part of him. I know every part from watching him and living with him and being close to him, and yet driving to Oakland I look at his sullenness and anger and vacancy, his retreat and his turmoil, and I think, Who are you?