I bounce the ball downcourt, shift left, then right, dribble the ball from one hand to the other. The noise of the crowd fills my head, my muscles tense, but I press on.

During my three-year-old daughter Daisy’s eight-hour transplant surgery, I imagined lying beside her on the operating table whispering, “Mommy loves you.”

I’m staring at your hands. You’re using them to clarify medical words; to make shapes; to draw diagrams to help me understand what my brain can’t make sense of …

It’s 1969, somewhere in Alaska, my first time on sentry duty for the United States Air Force; the middle of a December night, thirty degrees below zero, a guard shack in front of a nuclear weapons dump site.

The steel guardrail familiar against his knees. The straight, level bridge concealing its loftiness, the gorge below indistinct in the moonlight. [CW: suicidal ideation]