Excerpt From ‘Conversations With My Fathers’
i.
she brought an island’s worth of family to the states, her eye beaconed the promised land of mammon, and we came. when her dementia was really bad she worried she wouldn’t go to heaven, for the sins she carried, the kin she buried, if not in death, then in forgetting. but she’s hardly alone in that: we’re all sinners if ignoring our bonds is the measure of loving each other,
including me. which is why she asks me. and i answer the way a son answers his elderly mother: with a …
