Sydney had never forgotten to eat in her life. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place w… - Maureen F. McHugh

We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst.

Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it.

One Christmas my dippy older sister was talking about God protecting her from some minor calamity, some domestic crisis involving getting a dent in her husband’s Ford pickup, and later, as we drove home, Allan said, grinning, “I’m so glad that God is looking after Matt’s pickup. Makes up for whatever he was doing during, you know, Cambodia, or the Black Plague.”