To my friends, I tell the story as a joke. If Sarafina comes up in conversation, she — who bought me a beautiful pink tutu when I was nine and gave me beads and clasps to make my own jewelry when I was 14 and took me to Birdland to hear jazz when I was 19 —  is now cast as an eccentric. She is my crazy aunt, the one who changed her name. # Peggy’s new name and lifestyle elicit revelations within the family. We used to find her lying on the ground, staring, my mother says. She’d bless herself over and over. She was sent to a psychiatric hospital when she was 14 years old, Philomena says ..read more

*Featured Artwork by Tara Koger/Columbus Community Deathcare “…when the time comes to let it go…” —Mary Oliver I Outside the door I linger, close my eyes, breathe deeply, then three quick raps and I enter her tiny apartment. “Hi, Mom,” I say, handing her a bouquet of carnations I bought at Safeway and kissing her... The full Vigil by Shirlee Jellum can be found at Memoir Magazine ..read more

The Museum of Past Grievances by Jax Peters Lowell Featured Image: “In de maneschijn” by Martine Mooijenkind My beloved won’t answer the phone. He’s lost access to that fold of the hippocampus in charge of connecting voices with the faces stored in his lumbering hard drive.  He lets it ring, waits for me to pick... The full The Museum of Past Grievances by Jax Peters Lowell can be found at Memoir Magazine ..read more

A memoir in the finest sense of the genre! An easy read, packed with astonishing events that flow into one another like water, The View From Breast Pocket Mountain is a coming of age, cultural history lesson, travelogue, spiritual life journey, and enduring love story all in one. Who could ask for more? The writing is deft, refreshingly accessible, and at times even lyrical. Hill Anton is an excellent storyteller, her narration is honest, sincere, and tender, yet never self-indulgent—one cannot help but follow her from Harlem to Europe to the hills of Japan on a wildly inspirational journey t ..read more

Most days, I manage to distract myself from the horror of losing my bearing and blurring the lines in the fog of forgetfulness. I carry the markers for Alzheimer’s disease. While the average American has a 7% chance of developing it before age 80, my increased risk factor stands at 73%. This deep-seated fear, which I carry as calmly as I can, has become my natural habitat. At times, it has a blinding effect. Although there is a distaste for mothers acting like people, rather than how they should even if they are fearfully adding “retrogenesis,” a cognitive return to birth, to their to-do list ..read more

I try to cool the heat in my cheeks that her sarcastic “wise, rich daughter” comment brings on. Her walker embarrasses me, too – unsightly, attention-seeking, disheveled, barely functional. Ingrained in me since middle school is that we should not ever stand out more than is broadcast by our eye shape and hair color. My mom has been talking at the doctor without pause to disguise her dementia – about ads in the newspaper for less expensive miracle hearing aids, about how she doesn’t need to hear anyway, about how the old ones work fine. Even though it’s obvious to the audiologist that she’s n ..read more