parent
My parents raised me never to ask people about their reproductive plans. “You don’t know their situation,” my mom would say. I considered it such an impolite question that for years I didn’t even ask myself. Thirty-five turned into forty faster than McDonald’s food turns into cold non-food.
“Confessions of a Juggler,” The New Yorker, February 14 & 21, 2011, 65.
Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces—down to the last glassy splinter.
Letter to Martin Amis, dated March 13, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 516–17.