Being a parent is one long process of daring yourself to let go. Sometimes worry and love and control, all get jumbled up until you can’t see the difference.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.

Self-doubt and fear are sort of a buy-one, get-one-free package.

What do you do when you know something and nobody will listen? When you need answers and nobody will provide them? When you can’t trust anybody to help you?

We aren’t defined by our tragedies, by our history, by our mistakes, but by pieces of love and sadness and happiness, and the whole range of human emotions we feel.

Loss, death, a broken heart, no matter how figurative, was unbearable. There was never a guarantee you wouldn’t lose those you loved.

To feel love was to feel fear – you just couldn’t let it dictate your life. Love was a risk, but it opened up a world of possibility, one you would never experience without it.

Sometimes the rest of your life arrived by simply saying good-bye.

Suicide of a parent, that type of abandonment, it did things to a person. It didn’t take a shrink to tell me that I didn’t trust people to stay because my mom had promised she’d be there and then wasn’t.

You don’t have to be right one hundred percent of the time to show you love someone.