I was drinking my morning coffee when I brushed my hand over my wedding ring and felt something wrong. A hole where the diamond should be, a metal claw holding nothing. It’s one of the only pieces of real jewelry I own, the one I cherish most, and all that was left of it was a piece of rough white gold.

I searched the bed and shook out the sheets and pillowcases. I crawled on my knees through the house, sweeping every corner. I cried out loud to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, “Please help me.” Talking to him is an old family habit, handed down by generations who believe saints listen, the universe communicates constantly, and objects carry meaning.

This is how I think. I'm terrified of losing the people I love, and even more terrified that losing things means more loss to come. My husband, Michael, once caught something that nearly killed him: a diagnosis of Valley Fever that turned our world from tranquil to terrifying. So when I felt that hole where the diamond should be, the large superstitious part of me went somewhere dark. Did this mean something worse was coming for us or for any of the people I love? I tend to spiral like that.

My Italian father, Andrew, wore a gold cornicello around his neck, a little twisted horn meant to protect against the evil eye and ward off bad luck. My Irish mother, Peggy, would come out of her skin if you opened an umbrella indoors, wouldn’t let a pair of shoes or a hat near a bed, and if her palm was itching, checked if it was the left hand, which meant money coming, or the right hand, which meant money going. They believed losing something could be a message worth reading.

This wasn’t the first time Saint Anthony and I had been through something like this. A couple of years earlier, I’d spent two anniversaries mourning a poem my husband had written me, one with the words “dragons beware” in it, words that deeply moved me because, in my family, protection is how you recognize love. A man who would stand between me and the fire and fight off the dragons, every last one of them. I looked everywhere for that poem—drawers, files, inside books I hadn’t opened in a decade. I’d all but given up when my son, Andy, mentioned that an old website of mine might still exist somewhere in the internet’s memory. It did. I already knew Saint Anthony works on his own schedule. I hadn’t expected to need him again so soon.

I didn’t want to think about the night before. If it had come loose then, the odds of ever finding it felt like zero.

My friend Michelle and I had been circling each other for years, the way close friends do when life keeps interrupting the plan to actually see each other. So when we finally set a date, an Ani DiFranco show at the Libbey Bowl in Ojai, it felt overdue.

The Bowl sits inside a park that feels less like a park and more like a forest. We spread a blanket on the grass and ate our seeded crackers and salmon salad while the opening act played, catching up on years in an hour. We drank kombucha and wine, laughing about nothing in particular, just glad to be sitting together again.

As the sun dropped, we made our way to our seats, past a large sycamore tree over two hundred years old, bent so far down that its top curved into the ground and took root, forming an arch you can walk through. The story goes that the Chumash people bent it that way on purpose to mark a trail or a good camping spot, and that the Great Spirit would join two lovers who walked through the arch together. Locals call it the marriage tree.

We stood in awe, saying little, our arms around each other. I don’t know exactly what we felt standing near it, only that it felt close to spiritual. Partway through the show, Ani stopped and commented on the tree herself, and I remember thinking, so it’s not just us. She was amazing that night. By the end, I was clapping so hard my hands hurt.

When the concert ended, we walked through the darkness in what felt like woods, our feet crunching through layers of leaves on the path back to the car—a good day with a friend I missed. We vowed never to let time escape us.

We kept talking for the whole drive back to my house about faith, fate, and cosmic connections. I said these words out loud, "I'm not religious," and then caught myself because it isn't quite accurate. There's that stretch of time I don't usually bring up, but somehow it became part of our conversation that night, when my husband was in the ICU with doctors preparing me for the worst. I told her I taped pictures of saints all over his hospital room, and pictures of him too, so the medical staff who already knew him as a doctor would also see how loved he was. And while I'm not religious, at least in the biblical sense, I've had more prayers answered in my life than I can chalk up to coincidence.

Michelle was raised wild, in a religious cult in the woods. I was raised Italian, Catholic, in a mob world that ran on its own kind of unquestioned devotion. Neither of us believes in the religion we were handed, and neither of us has let go of everything. She gets her spirituality from trees, rocks, and mountain streams. I get mine from old churches with wooden pews worn down by other people's knees, and my collection of vintage saints found in antique stores or handed down from relatives who've passed. I touch their heads as I pass for good luck.

None of it had anything to do with the diamond. I didn’t even know it was gone yet. We spent an hour talking about fear and faith, things neither of us could explain.

My best friend, Joanne, called the next morning, before I’d even had a chance to call her. She’s Italian too, raised the way I was, saints on the dresser, holy water by the front door, crucifixes on the bedroom walls. I was sobbing when I picked up, and when I told her what was lost, she said these words: “It will find its way back to you.”

My sister, Gina, lives in Ojai, a place she calls magical. She chairs the city’s Historic Preservation Commission. She can explain why a building matters and why it needs protecting with such passion, you’d think she was talking about her own children. She’s the one who’d walked us to the Bowl the night before, giving us the whole tour as we went, what wood a restaurant’s wall was built from, who that person was we’d just passed on the sidewalk, a running history lesson. I almost didn’t call her. Weekends are sacred time with her husband, Todd, and I didn’t want to interrupt that over a ring.

It never occurred to me to ask her to look. Finding a diamond that small in a park full of leaves felt like a lost cause, like finding a needle in a haystack.

When I finally called, she didn’t even pause. “I’m going to go find it,” she said. Not a “will text you back later” or a sad face emoji. My sister just put on her shoes.

She and her husband went back to the Bowl where an extra night of leaves had fallen since we’d left. On the walk over, she told me that she, too, had summoned Saint Anthony. As she searched, she’d vowed to turn over every single leaf if that’s what it took. And then my phone rang. It was her, on FaceTime.

“Is this your diamond?” she said, holding something small and bright in her palm.

“Where…how?” I said. It was all I could get out.

“Under a leaf, near the tree.”

A stone that size, in a park full of two hundred years of leaves, found within hours, by someone who wasn’t even looking under the tree, just around it. The same tree I’d stood beneath the night before, feeling something cosmic, something almost divine. The same ground that gave me that feeling gave the diamond back too. It’s the same thing that happened with the poem. Something I loved was gone, and then someone who loved me found it.

My husband once stood up at our wedding and said the gods had blown us apart when we were young, only to bring us back together. I don’t know if I believe in gods, at least not in the way the word is usually used. Nor do I think of myself as a religious woman. But I keep ending up with the same idea anyway, whether it’s coming from a saint, a sister, a two-hundred-year-old tree, or a husband thanking gods he doesn’t fully believe in either.

I called out loud for help, the way my family always has, and someone came looking before I’d even finished asking, holding out exactly what I thought was gone for good, and saying, Not so fast. This one’s still yours.

I struggled with whether to publish this story. I thought about changing the headline, but I felt it needed to stay as is. I wrote it a few weeks ago, inspired by my cousin Al and something he said to my grandson Eliot, half joking, when we visited in July: “Let’s have a family reunion before another one drops dead.” Last Sunday, Al died at sixty-four. I’m still in shock; his daughters, his mother, his siblings, and his extended family and friends are grieving in a way that he, of all people, would never have allowed. I can’t get my head around any of it. I loved him like a brother. The hole he’s left in this family will never be filled. This is for Al.

My cousin Molly came riding in on a bike from Brooklyn to Manhattan in the pouring rain, carrying two boxes of Italian pastries, because we were in town and celebrating my birthday. She showed up at our hotel’s rooftop bar for my party soaking wet and handed over soggy boxes of cannoli and sfogliatelle like it was nothing. For me, it was proof that the last threads of a family that used to be enormous are still intact, and that the matriarchs who made sure there was always enough food and always room at the table are still living through Molly and her sister Stella.

That enormous family doesn’t exist the way it used to. When I was growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, it was all of us, every Sunday. Somewhere along the way, Sundays became holidays, and extended family get-togethers became weddings and funerals. It happens to most families eventually. Life pulls people toward their own households, their own kids and grandkids, and their own four walls.

Al, a few of my cousins, and I are determined to break down those walls. I have a special place in my heart for the ones who call first, who say come over before I’ve even landed, who talk about the next reunion like it’s already happening and mean it. Al or Johnny calls before we’ve even reached the train station. Joe says, “Just tell me where.” That’s the part we hold on to.

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco does a bit about growing up in a house like that, and every time I hear it I think he must have been raised two doors down. A doorbell ringing on a weeknight meant the whole family jumped off the couch shouting, “Put the lights on, somebody’s here, we got company!” Dad would grab his dark glasses and a pair of pants, us kids would slide across the floor in our socks, and Mom would grab the Entenmann’s donuts she kept on the kitchen counter, ready for whoever walked through the door. That’s how our Italian family operated.

Al, is Stella and Molly’s dad. Al brags about his daughters to everyone. He’ll tell you Stella is an old-school nonna at twenty-two who can cook like the best of the nonnas, straight out of Naples. Molly is old school too, he says, but with a wild, adventurous side that reminds him of himself. Al idolized my father, known to all the kids as Uncle Banjo, and of all of us, he reminds me most of him. He has my dad’s generosity and the same wild, hilarious edge that makes you think either of them could’ve stepped into a mobster role in a movie without changing a thing. Al will give you the shirt off his back, and his daughters are the same. He fusses over people and feeds them until they can’t possibly leave hungry or unhappy, all with that loud, larger-than-life energy. I’ve told him more than once that I wish there were a way to make it official, to turn him from cousin into brother.

A year ago, my husband and I took the train from New York with my daughter, her husband, and our little granddaughter, and Al was waiting for us at the station. He took us for drinks at a place on the water first, then drove us to Wooster Street to pick up pizza, the best outside of Italy, and brought it all back to his house. Stella and Molly had already set a table that looked like something out of our childhood, the kind of spread that used to appear every Sunday. When Cassidy spotted one of their childhood stuffed animals, they gave it to her, without question. My grandson Riley was in town on tour with his band, and they all got folded into it without a second thought. Everyone was welcome. That’s Al.

After we’d all eaten too much, we sat in his den as old photographs came up one after another on the big TV, and Al commented on them, and every one of us cried with laughter. He came to a picture of my father from decades ago, with some woman none of us recognized sitting on his lap. Al didn’t miss a beat.

“Uncle Banjo looks like he’s got a puppet on his lap with his hand up her ass,” he said.

A few of my cousins keep showing up, too. Joe comes to everything, no matter what. After a full day with us, he was still there that night when Riley’s band played in New Haven, standing in a room so loud it rattled your teeth.

Johnny Cake came too, and of course he knew the bouncer and bartender, which meant I didn’t pay for a drink all night. Our parents were best friends, and we’ve been bonded since we were kids. If we hadn’t been told we were cousins, we might have married. This summer he picked me up at the train station, along with our grandsons and their friend Chester, which took two trips, and gave us a tour of New Haven, all the dark places, with the kind of dark jokes that only land because he’s lived every part of what he’s joking about. Everywhere we went, somebody knew him. He keeps dog biscuits in his pocket for every dog who passes. Even the dogs know him.

There’s one place on that tour I never ask him to drive past.

For most of my life, our family’s heart was one big white house in New Haven. My grandparents, Michael and Maria, my Nonnie and Poppy, bought it together with their son Alphonse, my Uncle Foe, and his wife, Eleanor, my Auntie El. Their kids were raised there, and everyone who came after—grandkids, great-grandkids, nieces and nephews—spent their childhoods in it. After Nonnie and Poppy died, their daughters, my aunts Mena and Madeline, stayed upstairs. After Uncle Foe died, Auntie El stayed downstairs.

Eighteen years ago, Auntie El died. She was Cynthia’s mother, making her the grandmother of Al, Cindy, and Denice, among many others. Whenever my sister and I traveled to New York on business, we’d take the train to New Haven and stay with her. She took such good care of us that we never wanted to leave. We used to joke that she had the bedroom wired, because we’d lie there late at night and whisper that we were hungry, and within minutes the kitchen light would flip on, and she’d be pulling out leftovers. After she was gone, the bottom floor sat there like a hole the size of a city, and all the family could do was rent it out to strangers. I felt that hole every time I walked into the stairwell. But the upstairs was still intact, until it wasn’t.

Three years later, Aunt Madeline died. My sister and I wrote her eulogy, and I flew back to deliver it in the church. After that, Aunt Mena was up there alone.

Seven years after that, Aunt Mena died, the last of my father’s siblings. Once again my sister and I wrote a eulogy, and once again I flew back to give it, but this time everything appeared different. The house was already empty.

Aunt Mena had been living alone when she fell, and after that she was moved into assisted living. Al and his daughters had wanted to move in and care for her. Several of us, Al included, wanted to buy the house to keep that piece of our childhood intact. It didn’t happen that way. Family members made difficult decisions for her safety, and soon after, they sold the house. Maybe it was too painful to keep.

I flew into a New Haven I hardly recognized. I couldn’t bring myself to drive past the house. It felt like somebody had taken a piece of our childhood and knocked it down along with the walls. Losing the house was one kind of grief. Burying the people who filled it was another.

Al and I have never really gotten over it. When we see each other, we slip off somewhere to blow off steam. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who can one-up me on the use of the word fuck.

Things change, and life moves on, but this small group of us wants to stop time. We want to see the family, talk about the old days, and never forget what we had. We want get togethers with sauce and meatballs on the stove. We want our childhood back, and we’re the ones still trying to hold on to pieces of it.

Our nonnie, the aunts, the uncles, our own parents—all of them would have wanted us to keep this going. I liked that we never really had a choice; you weren’t asked to show up. It was expected, and everybody was happy to meet that expectation. I know they would never have let it fall apart while they were in charge.

It really was the best of times.

My cousin Mike said it better than I ever could: “Every Sunday was Christmas for us as kids.” That’s exactly what it was, and exactly what we lost.

I try to be honest with myself about why it isn’t like that now. People didn’t stop caring. It was a different time, before the internet, before everybody’s attention lived on a screen, when Sunday dinner didn’t compete for a teenager’s time. Ask most teenagers or young adults today if they’d rather spend an afternoon at a relative’s house making small talk with people twice their age, and they’ll tell you they’d rather be anywhere else. Getting twenty or thirty people to the same table, coordinating that many lives, was easy back then. It’s much harder now. So this isn’t a story about people who failed to show up. It’s a story about the handful who still do.

I know I’m not the only one who misses this. Plenty of families still live stacked on top of each other: a grandparent in the back bedroom, a married daughter and her kids upstairs, an uncle who never technically moved out. Italian families used to run that way as a matter of course, and some families still do. If you grew up in a house like that, or still live in one, you know what I mean when I say it was never a burden.

Which brings me to a conversation I had with my grandson Riley. He’s twenty-one now. He’s been to England, lived in Portland, Oregon, for a while, and toured across several states, but he talks to me most about New Haven. He was there a year ago with his former band, and he returned in July with my husband, me, his cousin Eliot, and their friend Chester. The boys had met Al when they were little, but back then he was just the big cousin who played with them the way he plays with every kid.

Eliot told me that Al hugged him so hard his feet left the ground, then said, “You’re family now.” That was all it took. One meeting as an adult, and Eliot was a fan for life. Riley got there first. He loves Al, and he’s bonded with Molly and Stella the way I bonded with my own cousins growing up. He and Eliot are like brothers, but Eliot lives a two-hour plane ride away. In a perfect world, there would be a version of New Haven for all of us, and Al would be the mayor.

Riley and I talked about my expectations, how much I miss the big family Sundays, the sauce and meatballs simmering on the stove, and he told me I might need to lower them. He’s not wrong, but then I asked him something he understood better than I expected. I asked why he loves New Haven so much, why he loves the mob stories and the family stories, why he loves Al and Stella and Molly, and Joe, and Johnny Cake.

Then I told him the truth. What he loves about these people is what he might love about me. These are my people, the ones who show up, the ones who refuse to let this particular corner of the family come apart, the ones still carrying what our parents and grandparents built, even now, even when almost nobody else is.

I love my family, and so do the ones I’ve written about here, and none of us plan on stopping. We’ll push for that reunion. We’ll call our cousins every time we’re in town. Some will be happy to hear from us, and some will be too busy, and we’ve made our peace with that. But we still carry what’s left of it between us: the recipes nobody wrote down, the jokes nobody has to explain, the understanding that when someone says, “Come over,” you go. I know our parents are up there watching us all, and I know they’re keeping score.

I also know that if my dad and his brothers were still here with us, somebody would be getting whacked.

A final note: I wrote all of this while Al was still here, and I’ve left it that way. I’m heading home to New Haven now for his funeral.

Here’s how I picture it. My father and his brothers are already at the table, in their good suits, and they’ve been holding a chair for him. His grandfather Foe had a quiet word with whoever works the gate, so nobody asked Al any questions on the way in. He gave every one of them that gigantic hug of his, the one that lifts you right off the ground, rolled up his sleeves, and went straight to the stove. Now there’s a pot of sauce going, and the uncles are bent over the racing form. Aunt Madeline is hollering at him for putting in too much salt, Aunt Mena is hollering at Aunt Madeline for saying anything at all, and Nonnie and Auntie El are ready to hit them both over the head with a wooden spoon. My father stands next to him with a piece of bread, tastes it, and says nothing, because there’s nothing to fix. My mom is tap dancing.

Heaven’s been run a certain way for a long time. I give it a week before it’s under new management.

Rest easy, Al. You’re with the family now.

Once again, Madonna is the subject, and women are the haters.

I watched her performance in awe. And like Lisa Rinna and the rest of the crowd, I got up and danced. Rinna, 63, told reporters she came to the VMAs for one reason and one reason only: Madonna. She even went platinum blonde for the occasion.

I assigned the MTV Video Music Awards, which aired on Sunday, to my Entertainment Public Relations class. They were to watch the show, review the PR narratives and highlights, and weigh in on whether or not it succeeded in reaching its younger target audience. These are college students, mostly juniors, seniors, and grads in their early 20s. When we discussed it in class, none of them trashed Madonna’s age or her clothes, and none of them insulted her. They just talked about how much they liked her performance. A couple of them said they loved seeing the cross-generational moment of younger artists on stage with an icon.

But women my age? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

I guess Madonna committed a crime, but I still haven’t figured out what the crime is. She came back to the VMAs stage for the first time in 23 years and performed a killer show. Then the comments started, most of them from women around her age. They accused her of wearing a diaper, of being on drugs, of being too old for everything from dancing to singing, to just being. It didn’t matter that she won seven awards, including Artist of the Year, Best Album for Confessions II, Best Collaboration for “Bring Your Love” with Sabrina Carpenter, and Best Dance, Best Long Form Video, Best Choreography and Best Cinematography for Confessions II: The Film.

And now MTV is being accused online of rigging the awards. People are asking how she could beat Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter, and how she beat Olivia Rodrigo for Best Album. The theory is that young people don’t vote for Madonna, so MTV must have fixed it to get her on the show or to pump up the ratings. I guess a 68-year-old woman couldn’t have won all that on her own.

I wrote a similar story a while back when Madonna performed at Coachella with Sabrina Carpenter. The same shitty comments came pouring in like a busted sewer pipe, mostly from women. They went after her lavender corset, her vintage boots, her dance moves, and acted like she was a disgrace. So here we are again, and why am I surprised? I just expect better from women in my age bracket. Maybe I was hoping as I watched her win all those awards for an incredible album that it might finally prove she’s a force to be reckoned with at any age. I was wrong. It’s just another hateful shit show aimed at one of the greatest performers in pop history.

But the thing I’m so perplexed by is why any woman would care enough to leave the nastiest comments on every site that mentions Madonna.

And don’t get me started on Megyn Kelly, who did an entire segment on her show called “Madonna Is Aging Like a Deranged Person.” She went after the performance, the outfit, the dancing, and what she claims is work Madonna has had done to her face. She said she feels sorry for her, and that Madonna should take a page from Pamela Anderson so men would still think she’s cool. Kelly is 55, and her advice to another woman is to make sure men approve. Apparently one takedown wasn’t enough, so she went on Piers Morgan’s show the same day to do it again. She told Madonna to “stop trying to look 38 when you’re 68, because it only translates to sad.” She told Madonna to find a more empowering narrative for 68.

Let’s compare résumés.

Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist of all time, with decades of hits, tours, and reinventions. She just walked away from the VMAs with seven awards. Megyn Kelly got her big network shot at NBC that ended in 2018 with the cancellation of her morning show after she defended blackface Halloween costumes. Now she makes her living on SiriusXM and YouTube, where she can say “fuck” on air but Madonna can’t wear a corset and dance.

One of them built an empire on breaking the rules. The other built a career on punishing women who break them.

At least the women on The View got it right and went after the haters on air. Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out that Madonna was being ripped apart for trying to look too young, at the same time actress Jasmine Guy was being slammed for letting herself age naturally. “You can’t win no matter which direction you take,” she said. Sara Haines said the people rage-posting aren’t exactly in a good mental state. Ana Navarro, 54, summed it up in three words: “Leave women alone.”

Go gray, you’ve let yourself go. Stay sexy, you’re desperate. Get work done, you’re fake. Don’t get work done, you look old. There is no version of an older woman these people will accept, other than one who stays home and keeps her mouth shut.

At first I thought it must be jealousy, and I was tempted to write “Jealous much?” on every vile comment, or what I was really feeling, “Go fuck yourself.” But I don’t really think these women want to be up on a stage dancing in front of millions of people. I think it’s more that they can’t stand that she’s allowed to, or that she can. I know plenty of women who stopped wearing what they liked and stopped dancing in public because somebody told them that’s what you do when you get older. You tone it down and age gracefully, whatever that’s supposed to mean. As far as I can tell from reading these comments, it means disappearing.

And the diaper comments, I mean, really. Women who age know exactly what they’re doing when they say something like that.

Maybe these women see Madonna as a threat because she stands for everything so many of them have decided to be against. They punish women for being young and for being old. The only exception is the woman who fits their idea of what a woman should be. I would guess that these haters probably are anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, anti-anything that doesn’t fit the boxes they’ve checked as acceptable. Madonna has spent 40 years staying outside the box. She put gay culture front and center when nobody else would, and she stood up for people with AIDS when most of the country wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. Maybe the women tearing her down don’t have any of that in them anymore. Maybe they’ve lost their motivation, and they feel like everything should stop with them.

The strangest part is that the young women in the business don’t seem to care at all. Sabrina Carpenter did a song with her and accepted the award with her, and Charli xcx performed with her. They see her for exactly who she is. If you don’t believe me, watch the show and look at the young people in the audience dancing to her music. Nobody in that crowd was checking her birth certificate.

And then there’s Taylor Swift, the biggest pop star on the planet. She walked out of that same show as the most awarded artist in VMA history and went looking for Madonna in the theater so they could talk and take a picture together. These two go way back. In 2015, Madonna praised Taylor’s songwriting, and that same year Taylor played guitar while Madonna sang “Ghosttown” at the iHeartRadio Music Awards. Eleven years later, Taylor is 36, at the top of her game, and she still treats Madonna like the queen she is.

Meanwhile, the women in those comment sections chose the opposite, and I’ll admit I was tempted to do the same to them. I could take apart their profile photos, and believe me, I thought about it as I held my fingers in a tight fist. I could comment on their wrinkled faces, or their caked-on foundation, or their blue eyeshadow stuck in 1987, but what’s the point? I’d be guilty of the same thing they’re doing to Madonna.

Do people even understand who Madonna is? At the very first VMAs in 1984, she came out of a giant wedding cake in a wedding dress, lost a shoe, rolled around on the stage, and flashed her underwear on live TV. In her acceptance speech on Sunday, she said her manager told her afterward that her career was over. It wasn't over then, and it isn't over now. Forty-two years later, she's still getting shit for showing skin, and people have been telling her to cover up and go away the entire time.

I wish women understood what it means to put other women down, and that every time they do, they're agreeing to the same rules that are going to be used on them.

So get off the computer and go hang out with some young people, the loud ones, the queer ones, the ones with tattoos, the ones you’d judge before they ever opened their mouths. Or hang out with some of us who refuse to age by anyone else’s standards. Spend a some time with a few badass women your own age, and you might remember what it feels like to stop caring what people think. And the next time Madonna gets up on a stage, try getting up and dancing instead.

A new friend knows who you are right now. An old one knows how you got here.

My best friend has been standing next to me since I was sixteen, which means she’s seen every version of me there ever was, including the ones I’d like to forget and the ones I brag about. People hear “fifty-four years” and picture something cute, like matching mugs or a scrapbook. What we’ve got is closer to invisible handcuffs. Nobody locked us together on purpose, but somewhere in the last five decades the cuffs went on anyway and neither one of us has ever once reached for the key.

If you’ve got a friend like this, you’re already nodding. It’s not about how often you talk or how much you have in common anymore, though we've got no shortage of either. It’s that she’s seen the whole thing, start to now, and she’s still here.

I landed in California at sixteen against my will, because we had to flee Miami Beach fast, another one of the moves that came with being Banjo's daughter. This meant leaving behind every friend I had and starting over in a state I didn't ask to live in. Moving was nothing new to me, but moving as a teenager is so much more difficult. I’m saving the gory version of that story for the book I’m writing with my sister, but the short version is a new school, the first week, a group of Mexican girls jumping me, a concussion and a hospital stay, and a new friend who never left my side.

Walking into that first classroom, I felt like an alien who’d spent her whole life on a Miami beach in a bikini, slicked in baby oil and Bain de Soleil, running around with rich Cuban boys. Los Angeles had its own Latino culture and it had nothing to do with Miami. These guys had slicked back hair and drove cars that bounced on hydraulics to old school jams. I was used to hot Cuban guys with wads of cash, so my only prior exposure to any of it was the song “Low Rider” playing on the radio.

And there I was at Burbank High in hot pants and platform shoes, looking like a tan groupie who’d wandered off the Sunset Strip and gotten lost on her way to homeroom.

Joanne saw something in me anyway. Maybe it was the Italian mob upbringing that presented as attitude. Whatever it was, she decided we were friends within days. She was right there at my hospital bed like she’d known me for years instead of days. She also became a favorite of my father’s, and later his watchdog.

Somewhere in those high school years, the two of us put together a slideshow, photos we’d shot all over LA set to music, for some class project neither of us can even remember. It turned out so good that a teacher pulled it aside and had us show it at a school assembly, the whole student body watching in the dark. Nobody in that auditorium caught that one of the slides, shot in Griffith Park, had a couple in the background having sex. Next slide. Decades later, when I started teaching digital journalism, it hit me just how far ahead of our time that whole project actually was, cutting photos to music before anyone had a word for it. The soundtrack was Tower of Power, Malo, El Chicano, Earth Wind and Fire. The carousel is long gone, photos and music both, but I’m still proud of that slideshow.

We were just two teenagers back then, with no clue how long this thing between us was actually going to run.

We ended up dating Italian brothers. I married one of them, my son’s father, Steve. Joanne was maid of honor at that wedding, both of us only eighteen, and at the two weddings that followed. I was hers at one of her two. Her first wedding was set to be two hundred and fifty guests, presents already piling up, dresses for the whole wedding party already bought and paid for, and then she called the entire thing off. When she got married again years later, she didn’t ask me to stand up for her. She said she felt so guilty about the money I’d already sunk into that first dress that she couldn’t bring herself to ask me to do it a second time. I was hurt. The whole thing turned into a communication breakdown and one of maybe three or four knock-down, drag-out fights we’ve had in fifty-four years, which tells you something about how solid the rest of it has been. We got past it, and I was her maid of honor four decades later, at the wedding with the husband she has now.

The thing no one tells you about a friendship this long isn’t that you never fight. It’s that you never let the fight end you. We don’t believe in walking away from each other, and we definitely don’t believe in the silent treatment, or avoidance, dressed up as self care. We just love each other too much to ever leave.

I remember one of the few fights we had that ended with the two of us screaming at each other in our pajamas because we were going to settle this now, even if it meant getting out of bed and sitting in a car in a driveway until we were laughing.

Joanne is my person. My compadre. My confidante. My sister, minus the 23 and Me.

I don’t know how to explain what a friendship like this feels like except to say it’s like sitting in a dark theater watching a highlight reel of your own life, except your best friend is in almost every frame. We’ve been thrown out of nightclubs together. We got kicked out of the male strip club Chippendale’s once, and Joanne left with only one shoe that she hung on her bedroom wall. We rushed the stage at a Rod Stewart concert wearing matching pastel chemin de fer jeans that split down the crotch when a bodyguard threw us off. We rushed a stage again at a Sly and the Family Stone show at the Forum, that time because Sly was so stoned he invited the entire crowd up with him. We nearly got assaulted in that mess and somehow walked out alive, our shirts ripped so badly our bras were showing. On the way home, we sat in the back seat of her father’s car laughing quietly. Thank God it was her dad picking us up and not mine. My father would have seen straight through any excuse we cooked up. He never even knew I’d gone to that concert. As usual, my mother covered for me.

I spent more nights at Joanne’s house growing up than at my own, and her Italian Irish family felt like walking into a mirror of mine. Her father held her, or one of her sisters, up against a wall by the neck when the antics called for it. My father used to throw me across the room, always aiming for the soft couch that was hit with such force that it knocked me on the floor. Different fathers, same parenting. The funny thing about us is that we never feared our parents. We navigated life with this motto: “Who cares if we get in trouble if the fun is worth it.” That fun often involved borrowing, or maybe stealing, her parents’ gold Chevy Nova after they were asleep.

Dinner at either of our houses sounded like a full blown argument, but that’s just how Italians talk to each other, always at full volume. The dishes cooked by our mothers were the same because both families came from the Naples area, another reason why being together felt so familiar. I don’t think I could be best friends with someone who ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. We ate subs with enough Italian cold cuts to put you to an early grave, which might explain both of our heart issues.

This is probably the part where you start to recognize your own version of Joanne. Everyone who’s had a friend this long has a version of this story, and each one only makes sense to the person who lived it with you. You could tell it to anyone else and they might laugh in the right spots, but your best friend is the only one who gets it.

We went through marriages and divorces together, learning how to be single mothers side by side. My second divorce is when I practically moved into her house in North Hills, a neighborhood with gang activity close enough to hear at night. It never bothered me, because Joanne kept a gun in her closet and knew exactly how to use it. I never once felt unsafe there because I had Joanne on guard. My father kept a gun too, which again tells the familiar story of feeling protected.

One of the funniest nights happened while I was dating my current husband. We’d flown to New York and he took pictures of me waking up in a gold silk nightgown. When the photos came back I hated every single one and refused to show him. Joanne had the fix. After several glasses of Absolut Hunks, named after the character Smith Jerrod from Sex and the City, a show we never missed together, she decided we should just recreate the photos ourselves. She put on her best lingerie and we took a hundred pictures until we passed out drunk in her bed. We woke up to her adult son, Evan, walking in with two of his friends. Joanne, halfway to grabbing the gun because we had no idea who was in the house, jumped out of bed in a white satin nightgown. Evan looked past her at the doorway, saw his mother in lingerie, and said, “Mom?” Then I stepped out behind her in my own nightgown. “AUNT TONI??”

When the photos came back from that night, we were convinced we’d look hot. Instead, we looked like two women who’d been dragged behind a truck. Wrecked hair, faces straining for sexy and landing somewhere closer to constipated. We made a blood oath to never let another human being see those pictures. They’re sealed in an envelope and they’re staying there until one of us is dead, and possibly after.

We’ve had every high, every low, every love and every loss two women can rack up, and through all of it we’ve remained best friends with attitude. We recently hit an ungodly birthday within fifteen days of each other, which we mark every year with some ridiculous themed celebration involving wine, or tequila, or martinis. The milestone years live on in our memory, and occasionally in photographic evidence.

Joanne recently told me that our window for being reckless is closing fast. We’ve got matching stretch marks of the soul at this point. Last week was our milestone birthday celebration. I already planned the recovery day, from bed.

The plan for our shrinking window of recklessness started with a bungee jumping exercise class and ended with steak and martinis. Not so much reckless as feckless.

We planned on getting tattoos, but both our doctors said there’s a bleeding risk. That tells you plenty about our age and about how many prescription meds we’re on these days, which outnumber the glasses of wine I drink nightly and the weed gummies Joanne downs. Part of me still wanted to risk it. What’s the worst that could happen?

The night before, I told my husband I might be coming home in an Uber, or in a police car, or in a hospital bed bleeding to death.

But somewhere between the bungee harness and the last martini, the day turned into a strange little tour of exactly who we’ve become. The class alone should have humbled us. I got strapped in, dangling from the ceiling with nothing to hold onto, and lost control, spinning in circles and yelling for help. Joanne was in front of me, and it was high school all over again. The owner caught the whole thing on video.

We were still catching our breath when a stop for lunch at San Antonio Winery turned into an afternoon with the owner, Santo Riboli, swapping stories about our shared Italian roots and the neighborhoods around LA that used to be Italian before they weren’t, and how younger people are the ones bringing them back now. He kept the wine coming for free and we walked out with a new friend.

Then the day did something neither of us saw coming. At the Yoko Ono exhibit at the Broad, we hammered a nail into a wall with a strand of our own hair tied to it, and wrote a small tribute to our mothers before taping it up alongside thousands of strangers doing the exact same thing. Two friends standing in a museum crying over conceptual art. It turns out that we only knew the version of Yoko Ono everyone gets handed secondhand, not the actual woman who made all of this. Standing there, it hit me that people probably do the same thing to us. They see two loud women who don’t act their age and assume that’s the whole story. Somewhere in that exhibit, hammering a nail into a wall next to my best friend, getting old stopped looking like the end of something and started looking more like a beautiful next chapter.

We closed it out where it all started, at the Smokehouse, an old school Burbank restaurant we’d spent countless dinners at with family, friends, and boyfriends, that still feels like the world felt back when we were sixteen. Steak, martinis, a red leather booth, old classics playing low enough to actually talk over. Harnesses, hair, hammers, grief, and steak, all in one day.

But if I had to pick the one moment that stuck with me, it wasn’t the wine or the exhibit or even the steak. It was hanging from that ceiling, laughing at ourselves, never once worried about who was watching or that it was on video. Unlike the lingerie photos, we were happy to have this one, proof of us just being us.

Somewhere in that bungee harness, spinning in circles and yelling for help, something in me let go. There was a time neither of us would have let anyone see us look that ridiculous. It turns out nearly falling on your ass in a bungee class is its own kind of freedom, the kind you only get once you stop needing to look good, or invincible. We’re not those girls anymore and we’re not trying to be. We’re just two women having the best time of their lives.

This goes out to anyone who has a friend like Joanne. The years don’t erase who you were together. They just give you more of it to laugh at.

That’s also when I stopped caring about the tattoo. I didn’t need it to be rebellious, or to mark our friendship, or to mark another milestone birthday. Ink was never going to say what I actually meant anyway. Joanne isn’t something I need stamped on my skin. She’s already inked somewhere no needle could ever reach. This kind of friendship is a tattoo of the heart, and my BFF has been tattooed on mine since I was sixteen.

In the last hour of the night, we talked about Los Angeles, our family, our friends, our entire shared history, and it hit us both at the same time what we mean to each other.

“I love you so much,” she said. “And I love you so much,” I told her back.

We held on another minute before saying goodnight, and for once our age didn’t feel like a countdown. If we’re going to get old, at least we’re doing it together.

How lucky are we?

Fair warning, this one's dark. Something about this birthday knocked loose a part of my brain that's now stuck on death, and I can't seem to shake it. I am having this stark realization that I'm old AF now. I am no longer getting older, or of a certain age. I'm officially old and I have the recent birthday to prove it. Thoughts of Cher and Madonna, and all of the other women who made a deal with the devil to never age, aren't getting me out of this funk. At this point, I'm open to cutting my own deal. Forget the devil, I'll go straight to the top. Somebody get me a meeting with whoever runs heaven, if there is a heaven.

The problem with aging is that my brain still thinks I’m thirty, and when I was actually thirty, I’d see people my current age and think, fuck, that person is old as shit.

Now I’m that person and I’m old as shit and the shit just got real.

I've been afraid of dying my whole life. Nothing about this is new, but what is new is that the idea of the Grim Reaper used to be something that spooked me but that I’d never actually seen. Now he's standing at my bedroom door, an uninvited guest, and for the first time in my life, someone I can't talk my way past. This black-cloak-wearing scary motherfucker isn't budging, and I have no move.

It happens mostly at night because I’m an insomniac, and insomnia is just your brain’s way of saying, “Since you’re up anyway, let’s think about dying.” I’ll be lying there at 2 a.m. doing my usual list making and praying to a God I’m not sure I believe in, and suddenly my chest tightens and my brain tells me that one day I’m going to stop existing. The idea of becoming a pile of dust or a rotting corpse is unbearable.

I was raised Catholic, but my rational brain is pretty much convinced that there’s no heaven, no hell, no anything. Just lights out, show’s over, thanks for coming. I believe this almost completely, until the fears begin and I’m praying with my imaginary rosary beads like a goddamned maniac to anyone who might be listening.

“Please don’t let me die,” I plead into the black void.

At 2 a.m., I also believe in ghosts. I’ve gotten out of bed to grab a glass of Pellegrino and scared myself into believing I heard something which makes me run back to bed and hold onto my husband for dear life. Nothing new for him. He just puts his arms around me and says his usual, “What is it this time? Death?” I just respond, “ghosts.”

As afraid as I am of ghosts, there are times I find comfort in them. If ghosts are real, I might be able to come back as one and watch over my family while haunting the ones that wronged me. Definitely better than not existing.

And at 2 a.m., every doctrine I shed decades ago comes crawling back like a rat in New York scurrying for the discarded old pizza. Sometimes, that superstitious corner of my brain insists hell might be real. I’ve already worked out what it looks like. It’s not fire and brimstone and pitchforks. It’s a thrift store, one of those giant warehouse ones where you buy clothes, shoes and household items by the pound, but this time it’s the size of an airport hangar and it never closes and everything smells faintly of other people’s regrets. To get there, you don’t get struck by lightning or swallowed by the earth. You take a coach flight, a long one, in the middle seat. No warm nuts, no free flowing champagne, no pillow and no blanket. Just some non-alcoholic punch in a paper cup and a bag of stale pretzels with two people on each side of me. One is cleaning their fingernails with a fork and the other has their bare feet on the tray.

That’s my hell.

But maybe I've got it backwards. Maybe I should be picturing heaven instead. In heaven, I'm in first class with an endless supply of champagne, on my way to New York, shopping at every designer store with money to burn and zero guilt about it. Then I board my first class flight home, except home is a penthouse in the sky with a doorman, housekeeping, laundry service, a personal masseuse, and a hairstylist on call.

My best friend has a plan for when things get bad, not death bad, but mind bad. She’s told me over wine that if she starts to lose her mind, she wants someone to load a lethal dose of something into a banana and shove it down her throat.

I’ve thought about my own bottom line that I don’t want to cross. It’s not memory in general, but song lyrics. The day I can’t finish a verse I’ve known since I was thirteen, like a Joni Mitchell song with a chorus that just isn’t there anymore, that’s it. Somebody hand me the banana and force-feed it to me like a goose bound for foie gras.

What really gets me about death is not so much the thought of dying, but the horrifying thought of no longer existing. In the calm of daylight, I can sort of make peace with pain and decline. What I can’t make peace with is the idea of the lights going out and there being no one and nothing left to be annoyed with. Even a bad afterlife would be better than no life at all. At least in my thrift-store hell I get to complain about the coach seat.

The worst part about fearing death is that it doesn’t even buy you the consolation prize of appreciating your one wild and precious life. You’d think staring down the void nightly would make me grateful. Instead, I just feel robbed in advance.

Nora Ephron once said that death doesn’t really feel eventual or inevitable, that it still feels avoidable somehow. But it’s not. We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.

I believe it now. Nora died at seventy one and that tells me all I need to know about life and death. It isn’t fair.

I have a theory about marriage, and it’s not scientific and it hasn’t been peer-reviewed. No one is going to publish it in The Journal of Relationship Psychology or cite it at a conference. The test is this: How do you feel when you see his underwear on the floor?

I’ve been married three times so I guess that makes me an expert on what makes a failed or successful marriage. If anything, it’s given me data.

But before the husbands, there was my father.

Out in the world, he was the kind of man you noticed before you heard him and remembered long after he left. He wore custom-made three-piece suits, Italian silk ties, and enough Aramis cologne that the EPA could have opened a case. His hair was always perfect because my mother saw to that, so devotedly that she once fell off a stool while combing it and knocked herself unconscious. The dark glasses were always on, mostly because underneath them were lenses so thick that at 15, those round frames earned him his mob name, Banjo. He had been hiding behind them ever since, which if you think about it, solved two problems at once: Nobody knew what he was thinking, and nobody knew he could barely see them anyway.

He was a bodyguard to men like Frank Sinatra, and he moved in a world where appearance was armor.

And then he came home.

It was like watching Superman find a phone booth and come out the other side as an Italian Clark Kent. The suit came off. The tie came off. The dark glasses switched to clear ones, but the gold cornicello, the Italian horn charm that guarded against the evil eye, stayed around his neck.

What remained was tighty-whities, a white ribbed sleeveless undershirt, and an enormous quantity of body hair running from his neck to his ankles. The hair was so dark and abundant that it made him look like an ape who had just made parole.

In the mornings, his underwear would be by the side of their bed. I’d walk past it without seeing it, because it had always been there and always would be. It was just a part of the decor of my parents’ bedroom, a square of white cotton on the brown shag carpet, as unremarkable as the gold-legged nightstand or the crucifix on the wall.

My mother never complained about it. My teenage understanding of this was damaged for life when I asked her how someone like her could be so attracted to this loud, bossy, intimidating, misogynistic man. She was a former dancer who kept her tap shoes in the trunk of the car just in case, with long legs and blonde hair and a smile that belonged in the movies.

“You don’t know what your father is like behind closed doors,” she told me.

“And I never want to know,” I said.

But I can assume now, with total confidence, that he passed the underwear test. Those tighty-whities on the floor were, for her, evidence of the man she loved.

Which brings me to my own data.

My first husband was Italian and cute in a Billy Crystal kind of way, and my father adored him. I was young and I wanted out of my father’s house, and marrying a man my father loved seemed like a reasonable escape route. I knew before the wedding that nothing was going to make me feel a sexual attraction to this man because kissing him felt like kissing a cousin.

He was funny in a way that made strangers feel like old friends. He loved the outdoors, and his signature look was cutoff jean shorts with his colorful print cotton boxers always hanging past the frayed denim hem.

He was the kind of guy who woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled over, and said: “Pull my finger.” He wasn’t joking. What followed was exactly what you think.

I would look at his boxers on the floor, inside-out and wrinkled, and feel exactly what his pull my finger routine made me feel: an annoying little cricket chirp that over the years got louder until I couldn't hear anything else

The second husband was a rock musician. Gorgeous blue eyes, blonde shag hair, dressed like he had stepped out of an English rock magazine. Underneath the tight jeans were wild animal print bikini briefs, the kind I assume Tommy Lee wears.

He later became a slurring, staggering drunk.

There’s nothing that will cure you of finding leopard-print underwear sexy faster than watching a guy wear it and nothing else while stumbling across your bedroom floor. The hot bass player I had once watched command a stage had become someone whose bikini briefs on the floor next to our bed made me want to run as fast as the cheetah the look was stolen from.

The third husband is a doctor. He wears white, classic Hugo Boss briefs. The man has opinions about things like expensive knives, shoe trees, and the thread count of toilet paper. His underwear is no exception. I moved into his home, which meant navigating someone else’s life, his closets, his routines and his hierarchy of kitchen equipment.

I remember the first morning I woke up in our house, a phrase I was just getting used to, and saw his underwear on the floor. White briefs, slightly twisted at the waistband, the way underwear gets when a man steps out of it in a hurry.

I stood in the doorway in one of his button-down pajama shirts and looked at it. I felt something warm, something close to a sexual feeling. I was swooning over underwear.

I’ve started asking around about this, informally, over wine or in the car on the way home from somewhere. The conversations usually start with “Can I ask you something weird?” I’ve posed the question to friends in long marriages, short ones, marriages that are thriving and marriages that are audibly in trouble.

The results are not scientifically significant, but they are consistent.

My friend whose marriage has been on the rocks for a few years told me that she and her husband sleep in separate bedrooms now, connected by a shared bathroom where his underwear still ends up on the floor. Enormous underwear stretched out and shapeless in a way that feels like a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong. She cannot bring herself to touch it. She uses a broom handle to move it to the hamper.

I didn’t laugh when she told me this, because I know what it means when a woman picks up her husband’s underwear with a broom handle. Once disgust gets that specific, it doesn't go away.

The women I know who are still lit up by their husbands, not just going through the motions, tend to use a specific word when the underwear comes up. They call it sexy. It's evidence of him, proof his body was in this room and will be again tonight, and this small cotton proof of that is something worth smiling at.

The women who are miserable describe a revulsion that goes beyond the domestic. They’re not annoyed about dirty laundry but enraged by its presence.

Here’s what I think the underwear is about. It is the garment closest to the body, to the specific part of his body that is, depending on the day and the man and how many years you’ve been married, either the source of your greatest pleasure or a non-event you could live the rest of your life without encountering.

You can spend years in therapy unpacking your attachment style, reading books about love languages, downloading apps that send you daily prompts to check in with your partner. Or you can just notice what happens in your body when you see his underwear on the floor.

Feel something warm? You're fine. Feel nothing? Pay attention. And if there's a voice in your head muttering lazy, inconsiderate, son-of-a-bitch, pack a bag. It's already over, and the underwear has been trying to tell you this for months.

After 21 years of marriage, I still swoon over Hugo Boss briefs on the floor. My friend reaches for a broom handle.

My father dropped dead of a heart attack on his way home from the tailor, carrying his three-piece suits over his arm, tighty-whities underneath.

My son Andy met me for coffee in our hotel lobby in New York last week and gave me his usual Ted Talk. I've heard this one before. Lower your expectations. He says it before every vacation, every holiday, every time he steps out his front door. It was even printed on a sign at the last XOXO festival, an annual festival and conference held in Portland, Oregon created and founded by him and Andy McMillan that celebrated independent artists and creators who work online. Apparently it's not just advice for his mother, it's a whole philosophy. He lives by this motto and it works for him. As for me, I’m the Clark Griswold character from the film Christmas Vacation. I don’t just raise my expectations. I make the bar so high it’s impossible to not be disappointed.

The conversation was about our stay in New York. My husband and I both hit some shocking milestone birthdays, him in July and me in August. We started planning our birthdays and decided the best representation of the two of us was a LA/NY theme. It didn’t matter that we had just traveled to New York in late June. We decided to go back and take the family with us, including our grandson’s partner and our other grandson’s best friend. That made the total fourteen, which meant arranging flights from Portland, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, all landing at one hotel in the East Village in Manhattan like it was the easiest thing in the world.

We kicked off the celebration in Los Angeles with a party at a vegan restaurant on Melrose in West Hollywood in their outdoor garden. Sixteen family members, all seated at a long table.

What I pictured: Laughter, fun, good food, good times. Lots of conversations, photographs, and memories made.

What actually happened: Adult grandkids bored, a sick nephew who couldn’t come, complaints about the worst food some of us had ever eaten, flies, and little conversation due to the long table that made it impossible to hear anyone.

But we still had New York.

We planned to kick off the NY celebration on the rooftop bar at our hotel, with a big party the next day on the rooftop of a restaurant in the Flatiron District. We offered meetups for everyone at our favorite pizza joint in the West Village, and breakfast at Russ and Daughters, my husband’s favorite restaurant in New York.

What I pictured: Family on the rooftop drinking margaritas and eating tacos, dinner the next day on the rooftop, a beautiful spot open and airy with views of the city, great food, and ambience. A five-day trip of togetherness that would create memories for years to come and time spent with my husband’s brother and his wife, New Yorkers who we miss terribly. Taking my adult grandson for the best cacio e pepe he’s ever tasted and my husband finally enjoying an authentic Russian bath where he would have deep philosophical conversations with our grandson.

What actually happened: Rooftop bar was 21 and over so two of our grandkids couldn’t come which made us desperate to find somewhere that would take fourteen people. A walk to a bar that would, but had little options for our family that includes vegans and vegetarians. A walk back to the rooftop bar with the over 21 family in a torrential rainstorm. We all looked like we were dragged out of the East River and sat in the bar with our hair and clothes drenched from the rain. The next night, the rooftop restaurant was half closed and very hot with big industrial fans blasting in our faces, a new pop-up menu that nearly everyone hated, my 19-year-old grandchild describing their hanger steak as beef with pie filling on top, my other grandkid, a vegetarian, reading the menu and finding out that all of their cheese is made with rennet, a meat enzyme produced in the stomach of mammals, so he was not going to eat. My four-year-old granddaughter waking up from a nap so terrified and jolted that she screamed bloody murder the entire dinner. An adult grandkid who showed up for our pizza meetup at our favorite spot who said he’d had frozen pizza that was better, and only two people joining us for breakfast, my son and son-in-law.

Our day and night with our New York family that included a visit to an art gallery and a Broadway play was halted when one of them took a fall at Grand Central station on their way to meet us that resulted in a four-day hospital stay. Our little granddaughter who is always pure joy only wanted to stay in the hotel room and play with Legos. The restaurant that everyone on Yelp raved about and claimed that they served their cacio e pepe in a cheese wheel, did not serve it that way. It was plated and served with a live mouse on the side. And the Russian bath? It was nixed because my husband learned that he would have to walk down several slippery steps in a fog of steam, and in his current state of wobbly recovery from a fracture in Mexico, he couldn’t risk it.

Back to my son. His morning talk was intended to gently shake me into reality. To make me understand that my expectations are unrealistic. That fourteen people could never navigate a city together because we all have different likes, dislikes, and tastes. His point is valid.

So why am I like this?

Here comes the childhood again. My father and mother ruined us. Holidays were so over the top that no one could ever replicate what we had. Presents under the Christmas tree would take over the entire living room. Easter baskets included stuffed rabbits bigger than a toddler. Valentine’s Day where boxes of candy were the size of a door. Dad was connected to the mob, and whatever he wanted to get us, he found a way, beg, borrow, or taken straight off the back of a truck in some alley, no receipt, no explanation. And mom? She was just as kind, in a different way. While dad was all about the size and quantity of the gifts, mom came through with gifts from the heart. That item of clothing at the expensive boutique that couldn’t be lifted off the back of a truck. Mom would save her money to buy it for my sister and me, no big announcements, just a quiet and unexpected surprise.

And the food was endless. We’re Italian, so a holiday meal was never just a meal, it was all day sauce with braciole and meatballs the size of your fist, trays of lasagna four layers thick, stuffed artichokes, bread torn instead of cut, and desserts you ate even after you couldn’t imagine anything else in your mouth. Sunday dinners were no exception. No one could ever eat the amount of food served every week.

Togetherness was not an option, it was mandatory.

I’m not sure how I feel about lowering my expectations. It almost feels like I’m giving up, like I’m disappointing my parents by letting go of the legacy they left us. So I go overboard on all of it. All a family member has to do is mention that they want or need something and I’ll make it happen. My sister is no different. Take the gigantic jeweled tiara she just bought me. We were strolling a pricey antique store and I put this thing on, and I felt like a queen wearing it. We laughed and she took photos. We walked out of the store and she handed me a bag. The crown was in it.

The sad part of this story is that the world has moved on without me, and all it’s done is make me ache for what was, knowing it’s never coming back. The adult grandkids have little interest in travel to the places they used to love, like Hawaii and Mexico. When birthdays or holidays roll around, their idea of a great gift is cash.

So I guess I’ll put all my hope in our four-year-old granddaughter who gets excited over Grammy letting her pick out Legos at the Lego store or Grammy’s bag that always has three surprises in it. Maybe I can pass down some small piece of my parents' appetite for going too big. Or maybe I can't, and I'm simply destined to keep setting the bar somewhere near the ceiling and watching everyone else duck under it.

Cue the violins.

I’m turning a milestone birthday tomorrow, and I’m about to do something that requires some courage: attempt to say it out loud where everyone can see it. Saying this number where people who don’t already know me and love me can hear it takes the same kind of bravery as Iggy Pop taking the stage shirtless at whatever age he is. You’re not sure it’s a good idea, but you respect the hell out of the commitment.

Almost nobody in the world outside of family and closest friends knows, and I’ve liked it that way. It’s really not about vanity, but more because the second people know the number, they start looking for the person who’s supposed to come with it. Older, slower, softer, done. That’s not who shows up when I walk into a room, and I have spent five decades making sure of it.

The part that messes with me is that nothing has changed. I still blast rock music loud enough to rattle the windows of my car. My hair is still long. I still dress like I’m on my way to a show, and some days I am. On other days, the show is my classroom, but I treat it the same. My students deserve someone with new and fresh ideas, who looks alive, who wears clothes that make them think, who is this person? There’s no montage, no slow fade, no moment where I traded the leather and Betsey Johnson leopard jackets for something sensible. I am the same person I was at 29.

Sixty-nine was a punchline I got to make for an entire year, and it felt like I was getting away with something. I was sixty nine and fine, and for the record, I still am.

Until tomorrow.

I look in the mirror most mornings and unless my eyes are malfunctioning, the woman looking back doesn’t match the number on the calendar. And what’s strange is that I kind of like what I see. Some mornings I look like a cross between Courtney Love on her worst, most beautiful bender, and if I’ve slept well, Michelle Pfeiffer. At least that’s who my husband tells me I look like before he puts his glasses on. Talk about denial. Two people with a shared delusion strong enough to hold up a house.

When the panic creeps in as it always does, I do what I’ve always done: I go looking for proof of life. I scroll through pictures of the women I’ve modeled myself after since I was a teenager with a bad fake ID, badasses like Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Stevie Nicks, Cher, Chaka Kahn, Madonna. You know, the ones out there refusing to act their age, whatever the fuck that means. Betsey Johnson at eighty four still wears her Raggedy Ann style hair and is doing splits at her own fashion shows, for fuck’s sake. Kim Cattrall’s perfect sixty nine fine ass could stop a subway train.

Every day, I pull on my jeans or tulle skirts, pair it with one of my T-shirts, throw on one of my many pairs of boots, style my blonde, shagged hair, and slide through the world incognito. And then I practice someone asking how old I am and I try to say it out loud but the number comes out of my mouth like a fish bone stuck in my esophagus. Excuse me while I choke.

I teach college, and my students tell me I’m a cool professor, which is a sentence I never in a million years pictured myself saying and which I now recognize as something Amy Poehler’s character June George says in that scene where the mom is trying way too hard to be one of the girls. I’m aware of how this sounds but I’m saying it anyway. I can hear Curt Cobain screaming “a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial.”

I have built an entire personality out of not acting my age, and this is the first time that personality has ever been asked to prove it under oath. Decades of refusing the dress code, refusing the “wine is bad for you” advice, refusing to turn the volume down, refusing to dim myself, and it’s currently failing against a calendar. You cannot talk your way out of a birthday. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve got decades of practice arguing with authority, and the calendar does not negotiate.

So why is this the birthday that’s got its knee on my chest when the others didn’t?

It’s not that usual thick cloud of mortality that hovers over me, the one I’ve never made peace with. This is different. It’s less “I am going to die” and more “How the hell did this happen so quickly?”

My best friend of over fifty years shares these milestone birthdays with me. We’re fifteen days apart in age, which means we’ve been aging in lockstep like some kind of horrifying synchronized swim team since high school. Each decade’s “big one” gets a theme. Sixty was “Beach Bitches,” so we headed to Nobu in Malibu for sushi and sake, got drunk, and planned on getting matching tattoos. I came home with a cat instead.

Frankie, named after Ione Skye’s character in one of my favorite films, Dream for an Insomniac, is now old as fuck. She is aging in cat years which means she walks around at night confused and howling, and in the morning, jumps on my chest and belts out a sound that can only be described as a bitchy, cranky meow. My only response to this poor aging white furry thing who can no longer jump on the bed without digging her claws into the sheets to hold on for dear life, is, “I feel you, girl.”

This year’s theme is “Rebels with a Cause.” We plan on getting actual tattoos this time, a bungee jump exercise class, steak, martinis, and a very healthy serving of denial on the side. Or maybe this time I’ll come home with an iguana and name her Samantha Jones.

When the self-pity starts creeping in, I think about my queen, Joni Mitchell.

Joni doesn’t give a single fuck about her age. She cares about her art and her music. I spent most of my career surrounded by 80s hair bands, not singer-songwriters like her, but the business is small, and these connections got me access to people like her, which is how I ended up, decades ago, sitting in a radio station studio while she performed live for an audience of three: me, my sister, and the airwaves. No crowd, just Joni Mitchell and an ashtray filled with her cigarette butts, six feet away, singing like she had something to prove to nobody but herself.

At 71, she wasn’t worried about her age. She was surviving a brain aneurysm that took away her ability to walk and play guitar, and she clawed her way back through sheer stubborn will. Ironically, I ran into her on my 67th birthday at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and I told her how happy I was to see her looking so great and that I was so relieved she’d pulled through. Joni, almost 80, took my hand, looked me dead in the eyes, and told me we were a couple of tough women who weren’t going anywhere.

If Joni believes that, I have to believe it too.

Something that has changed in the last decade is the meaning of songs. I put on Joni’s Both Sides Now, the version she recorded decades after the first, her voice sanded down by time and cigarettes, and it takes the legs out from under me. Landslide does the same thing. These used to be songs about growing up. Now they’re songs about having grown up, which is a different kind of gut-punch.

Instead of marinating in self-pity, I'm choosing to revel in the advantage of having spent a large part of my career inside the music business rather than outside it. I skated at a rock and roll skating rink where David Lee Roth pressed a matchbook into my hand with a note and an open invitation to his house afterward. (I went, and ended up in the hospital after falling into a nest of brown recluse spiders). I sat on a piano bench at a friend’s house next to Brian Wilson while he played Christmas carols. I have more backstage passes stashed in drawers than I have underwear, actual laminates, actual stories, decades of them, so many that I’m presently writing a book with my sister because one story could never tell all of it.

And it's not just backstage access. I was in the crowd, too, for shows I'll never stop bragging about. I saw David Bowie lowered onto the stage in an actual space capsule on the Diamond Dogs tour, descending on us like some kind of alien landlord. I stood close enough to Led Zeppelin to watch Robert Plant sing about squeezing his lemon until the juice ran down his leg and women around me throwing their underwear onto the stage. I watched a young Prince open for the Rolling Stones in a corset and high heels and get booed off the stage by a hostile crowd that had no idea what they were looking at. As for Joni, I've watched her from the front row more times than I can count, and had actual conversations with her, not just handshakes and photos. If the price of that access is turning this age, I'd pay it again tomorrow.

I guess the main point is that I'm still here. I've spent my life as a devoted, borderline reckless sun worshipper who used to joke that I’d rather end up a leathery old chick who actually lived than a preserved one who didn't. So maybe it's time to dig out the new version of Bain de Soleil SPF #4, throw on a bikini, and get on a raft somewhere warm and float around with a prosecco in one hand and a piña colada in the other.

So on this birthday, I’m going back to my roots. Not the ones I dye blonde, but the ones the women who raised me on rock and roll planted decades ago: don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks.

Which brings me to the list. I've been a list maker my whole life, a person who needs things written down to feel like they're real, and somewhere along the way that turned into something closer to superstition: as long as I've got things left to check off, I'm not allowed to die yet. Not a Bucket List, because bucket lists are for people preparing to go. Mine is a Fuckit List: things I still intend to do, with not one more fuck to give.

Fuckit List

1. Buy an apartment in New York

2. Go back to Italy and see my family

3. Finish the book

4. Meet John Patrick Shanley

5. Meet with David Chase

6. Visit Spain, Portugal, and the South of France

7. Make Joni Mitchell dinner

8. Float on a raft in Sicily

9. Own a Fendi sequined baguette

10. Learn to swim beyond dog paddling

11. Speak Italian and fluent Spanish

12. Don’t die

Oh, and Happy Fucking Birthday to me. Forever sixty nine and fine.

We were sitting in VIP seats at a Dodgers game. I wasn’t much of a baseball fan but came for the drinks, hot dogs, and sunshine. A man squeezed his way down the row in front of us with his wife, who was shouting at him to hurry up. He sat down, and for at least half the game, she nagged, complained, and wouldn’t let up. He looked defeated.

“Easy prey,” my friend said.

It was like a lioness describing which gazelle in the herd was limping.

She was single and divorced, and had dated several married men. When I asked her what the draw was, she didn’t hesitate.

The same two words as before. Easy prey.

Then she laid out the blueprint, and I recognized the logic because my father taught me a version of it years earlier. Find someone’s weakness and you can control them. He learned that lesson from the mob. She’d learned her version of it somewhere else.

I need to be clear that this story isn’t about women; its about a type of person. I’ve watched women run this on men, men run it on women, and a man run it on another man in a friendship that had nothing romantic in it at all. Different targets, different settings, with an identical playbook. Manipulation isn’t about gender, but opportunity.

It all starts with vulnerability. If you can find a person’s vulnerability and conduct an inventory of their weaknesses, you can make your move. What comes next is what psychologists call love bombing, though predators would never use that term. They’d just call it knowing what someone needs and being the one who provides it. They become a version of themselves calibrated to fill whatever hole is there.

Disney gave us a pretty clear picture of this when they created Ursula the sea witch in The Little Mermaid. She doesn’t go looking for the confident, secure, or the well-loved. She searches for whoever’s desperate enough to trade away the one thing they can’t get back for a taste of what they think they need. A poor, unfortunate soul.

Hollywood has been telling this story for decades without ever calling it what it is. Think of Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck. He’s aging, and one day he realizes his whole life amounts to nothing, so he cheats on his wife Rose with Mona, a ditzy redhead who does just one thing: tells him how smart he is. "You have such a head for knowing. You know everything,” she tells him. The seduction isn’t chemistry or romance, it’s finding the empty spot where his or her ego lives and filling it.

Once they’ve sunk their teeth in comes the second target: the people who might pull them back out. Friends get recast as jealous or as people who “don’t get it.” Family gets painted as controlling or as not knowing what’s best for them. My father called this the old divide and conquer, straight out of ancient Roman times. They don’t just find the weakness, they cut off every route back to solid ground.

Take our family member, a man who lost his wife. He was gutted and left unable to function in the smallest of ways. He didn’t know how to buy himself a shirt for an event because she had always done that for him, or how to dress his own salad at dinner, because she always reached for the oil and vinegar and handled it. These weren’t failures; they were fingerprints of a marriage. So he started online dating and met a woman who was waiting, listening, and coding all of it. First, she showed up with a shirt. Then she reached over and dressed his salad, replacing his wife’s rituals gesture by gesture until he couldn’t feel the difference between memory and her. Within months of the wedding, he’d rewritten his will, leaving everything to her. He died a few years later and the mess that followed is still in progress.

In Jewish communities, there’s a term for what often descends on a widower before he’s even finished grieving: The Brisket Brigade. Women arrive at the shiva with food, warmth, casseroles, and low-key availability, circling a man whose loss has made him exactly the thing my friend described.

Not every woman who shows up with food is calculating. Italians are famous for it, and the kindness is real, but so is the instinct, for some, to move toward a man whose defenses are down, whose future suddenly has an empty space in it shaped exactly like a person.

Brisket delivered during the shiva week isn’t evidence of a plan, but watch if it keeps arriving after the casserole dish should have been returned. Janice Soprano cooked up a scheme to replace Bobby Baccalieri’s beloved dead wife. She manipulated him into eating the last thing his wife left him, baked ziti in the freezer, telling him it would help him move past his grief. She was soon running his kitchen and his life.

Grief (and food) was his vulnerability. For the next man, it was something less obvious. He was in an unhappy marriage and decided to finally talk about it out loud within the earshot of a predator. A different wound, same hunter’s instinct for finding it.

This man was trying to get himself out of a long-term, unhappy marriage to a woman who had isolated him from everyone he loved: his family, his friends, his colleagues. So what did he do? He found himself a predator who convinced him he deserved better and needed to leave. “You are too good for this,” she said. So he left and was soon involved with someone threatening a lawsuit if he tried to leave her. He got out of both situations, but with little dignity, a damaged reputation, and less than half of the money he’d worked years for. He didn’t escape the pattern, he just changed hands.

And then there’s the one who fell prey to the Catholic woman, a religious narcissist. He couldn’t see the manipulation because she went to Mass every day, which apparently makes you a good person. She hid behind a house full of crosses and holy water and family photographs that she rotated on her shelves like she was working her way through a rosary. She swapped new faces in frames whenever someone was no longer useful. He fell for it, and eventually found himself without one member of his immediate family left in his life. She convinced him that his family were the bad guys, but made sure he knew she was "praying for them."Only a good Christian would disown an entire family and cover up her sins with prayer and daily Mass.

Or take our friend, financially secure and sharp, yet unable to see past the love bombing he's been subjected to. Every time he tries to pull away, she reels him back in, telling him how much she loves him and that loving him is all she's ever done. And then she pivots to a list of his deepest weaknesses, the ones that hit hardest. She'll say how sorry she feels for him for carrying these flaws, but that she loves him anyway despite them. He's left feeling like nothing even though he’s a something.

Money is part of this too. What a lot of these men and women have in common is financial security, and that’s not a coincidence. Predators don’t hunt where there’s nothing to take. The vulnerability gets them in the door; the money is why they stay.

And of course, the sex, at least for the ones in it romantically. In the beginning, they were all fucking like rabbits. Sex isn’t separate from the strategy; it is the strategy. It’s an offering in flesh, and the one thing that makes a person believe this is real and not rehearsed. One of these women looked one of these men in the eyes during sex and told him he was the only one who had ever given her an orgasm. Sure. Billy Crystal’s character, Harry Burns in When Harry Met Sally believed it too, but as fast as the ink dries on the newly written will or the marriage license, the sex dries up right along with it. Just ask our poor unfortunate friend who hasn’t gotten laid in six years.

I know that I’m making this sound like the predator always shows up in lingerie with a rewritten will in her handbag. They don’t. Male predators are just at good hunting.

There’s a woman I know whose predator never bothered with money or a marriage license, because he wasn’t after either. He told her constantly how beautiful she was, and that he’d get to “I love you” eventually. He happily came over for the home-cooked dinners she made, and he always brought the good wine, but never once took her anywhere in public. He wouldn’t introduce her to a single person in his life. He was good in bed but never stayed the night. He was jealous of her mind, and he showed that jealousy in the same breath as his praise, building her up and then slicing a small and precise cut that was just close enough that she could never tell which version of him to believe. She had the kind of body that came from daily Pilates, and mentioned once that she was lucky to have no stretch marks, even after having kids. That night, right after they finished having sex, he traced one faint line on her naked breast and said, “stretchy stretchy.” He took that physical thing she was proud of and turned it into a verbal observation meant to knock her off the pedestal. It worked.

Friendships with predators are no exception. It happens often.

A young, good-looking guy found himself in what wasn’t a romance but a friendship. The friend told him constantly how much he believed in him, how he’d always have his back. He also knew this guy struggled with depression, and he used that knowledge the way a surgeon uses a map of the body: to find exactly where to cut. In the same conversation, the praise would curdle into cruelty, the worst things he could say, delivered right alongside the warmth, so his target could never fully brace for it. He later learned it wasn’t a one-time cruelty but a pattern run on girlfriends and guy friends alike, on nearly everyone who got close enough to be useful.

Every person in these stories is smart, talented, and successful. None of them are fools in any other part of their lives, and yet every one of them walked straight into it, eyes wide open. If intelligence were any kind of vaccine against this, none of these people would have gotten anywhere near it. They’re not the exception to the pattern; they’re the target.

That whiplash between devotion and cruelty has a name clinicians who treat survivors of narcissistic abuse use often: the idealize, devalue, discard cycle, a pattern that’s drawn growing clinical attention in narcissistic and psychopathic relational abuse. Idealize is the love bombing. Devaluation is the insults and the withdrawal, delivered close enough to the affection that you can’t tell which version is real. Discard comes once you’re no longer useful, sometimes with cruelty, because you were never really a person to them, just a supply.

That’s why this happens even without money or marriage on the table. For some people, the supply isn’t financial, it’s the power itself, watching someone orbit them, doubt themselves, and keep coming back.

It works because intermittent reinforcement, warmth then cruelty then warmth again, is one of the strongest conditioning mechanisms psychology has documented. B.F. Skinner’s research on reinforcement schedules found that rewards delivered unpredictably produce behavior far more resistant than rewards delivered every time. Vegas figured this out long before psychology gave it a name. It’s the same principle a slot machine runs on. Applied to relationships, it’s more addictive than steady kindness or steady cruelty alone, because the brain keeps chasing the return of the good version.

Sadly, the person on the receiving end of this behavior usually plays some role in their own undoing.

Hunger that goes unspoken becomes hunger that gets exploited. If you’re not getting what you need and you say nothing, you’re a door left open. But the door being open doesn’t make the break-in legal. The predator didn’t stumble into these situations. They identified the need and executed the plan.

These people are narcissists who move through the wreckage they leave with an absence of guilt. It doesn’t register the way it would for someone who was ever really in it for the other person, because they weren’t. They were in it for what that person represented: a need they could fill, a life or a role they could step into, a person they could, in my father’s words, control.

Underneath it all, most of these individuals are lesser than. They’re jealous of what they can never have honestly: the talent, the success, the advanced degree, the status, the whole and functioning person, because building any of that themselves takes years they were never willing to put in. It’s easier to walk into a life somebody else worked for and take it. Or to find the most talented person in the room and take them apart for sport, not because they hate that person, but because that person’s existence is a mirror, and the reflection is unbearable.

We’re much more comfortable calling these people complicated, or damaged, or misunderstood. Maybe some of them are all of those things, but damage doesn’t excuse predation. Complicated doesn’t explain a detailed set of weaknesses and a rewritten will. There was a plan, a target, and an execution. That isn’t complicated.

None of this is an attack. It’s an observation I keep making again and again, with people who never see it coming. I was raised by an Italian mobster whose playbook came right out of The Godfather, so I learned early how to spot a predator before they’d finished sizing me up. I’m not angry when I write this. I’m just tired of watching these vultures circle the people I care about, picking away at whatever’s left unguarded.

The only thing about this sick pattern of abuse that offers any comfort is that most of these people end up where they deserve to be: alone. Or they move on to whoever’s next, because that’s what a predator does when the hunt is over, and there’s nothing left to take. My father was right. Find a person’s weakness, and you can control them. What he left out was that knowing your weakness is the only way to protect yourself, and there’s nothing weak about that.

Stay tuned for my new book: Love Bombing for Dummies: How to Spot It Before They Rewrite Your Will (just kidding).

I asked my daughter to draw me a print: What If It All Works Out. It hangs in my kitchen, right where I’ll see it every day. She made me a sticker version too, small enough to place on the back of my phone case so the question can follow me.

Some days the worry wins before I even notice it's started, and I have to stop myself and choose the other question instead. It's not easy, but I look at the print and the sticker on my phone because I need something in my view that argues back.

Life is so stressful now, between the politics, the cruelty, and the lack of empathy we’re witnessing in real time. Young people are struggling in ways I never did. I grew up in an unconventional and often unstable life, but it was a time when the only screens we watched were television sets with three channels. The news came on the TV once a day, and the morning newspaper was delivered daily on our doorstep. As a child, I was surrounded by cousins and family, and our days were filled with outdoor play, hugs, and in-person connection. My teenage years were a string of live music shows, parties, and late nights at coffee shops with friends and conversation. There was so much to recap, so many memories made, and so much laughter.

Today, many of the young people I know feel hopeless and depressed. Some of them, on their hardest days, are wondering if it’s worth it to keep going. And there doesn’t seem to be a cure for it. Not a pep talk, or a solution that sticks. All it ever took to jolt me out of a bad day was my mother’s unique brand of snap-out-of-it love, pulling me back into the present. She’d belt out one of her favorites, “Get Happy,” the old standard about shaking off your troubles and chasing all your blues away, or “Tomorrow,” the one every optimist seems to know by heart, insisting the sun comes back no matter how gray the day was. If only a song could fix this problem.

Depression rates among teens and young adults are climbing: just over twenty percent of teens aged 12-17 report a major depressive episode and among young adults, rates have more than doubled since 2017, from 13 percent to nearly 27 percent today. Suicide rates have risen significantly and is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 10-24, with Black youth ages 10-19 seeing the largest increase. The Trevor Project reports that LGBTQ+ youth are roughly three to four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-LGBTQ+ youth and rates are even higher for transgender and nonbinary youth.

These statistics should have us screaming HELP!!! from the rooftops. This is a national crisis.

There are days when I feel helpless, and the hardest part isn’t just the worry. It’s never knowing the right thing to say to someone who is struggling, never knowing which words will actually make a difference and which ones might make things worse.

The Cleveland Clinic reports that depression is highly treatable and manageable so that individuals can live healthy lives using care plans like talk therapy, prescribed medications, and lifestyle changes. This offers hope, but the person struggling has to believe it, and they have to want to stay around.

I understand that the future looks different than the one this generation was promised. The constant barrage of bad news, and a world that often feels like it's unraveling, leave young people with the idea that maybe the noise, the scroll, the ache of never quite measuring up, is just what life is now. Even worse, that maybe there isn't much of a future to look forward to at all.

I refuse to accept this. The rebel in me wants to say to every young person struggling, that staying alive is the rebellion. Every morning that you get up anyway, you're breaking the rules the world tried to hand you. And the future you can't quite picture right now needs you in it. It needs the person you're going to become, the one who stays stubborn enough to help build something better than what you were handed. You are not a statistic, or a headline, or a percentage, or a sad footnote in someone else's story. You are too good for this. Nobody is promising a perfect life, but there is so much still to find inside an imperfect one.

I wish I could offer something that would help, but the best I can do is what I always do when I feel scared or anxious. I make a list. So here’s are fifty things to hold onto, fifty things to be grateful for, fifty things to hope for. Fifty things that might make you stop and think that maybe these bad feelings will pass, or as we say in Italian, tutto passa, that the pain is temporary and the bad days will end. That this too shall pass.

1. Work that gives you purpose.

2. So many people who already love you.

3. People you haven’t met yet who will love you.

4. Things left to create.

5. New music to listen to.

6. Old songs that make you remember the good, and the bad, but feel something.

7. Ordinary moments.

8. A laugh that catches you off guard.

9. Old friends who have your back.

10. Meeting new friends.

11. Creating art, or admiring someone’s art.

12. Music that makes you weep.

13. Concerts you’ve seen and will never forget.

14. Concerts you’ve yet to see.

15. Achieving a goal.

16. Falling in love.

17. Having your heart broken, and then loving again, wiser.

18. Books you’ve yet to read.

19. Sharing your unique talents with the world.

20. Films you’ve yet to see.

21. Being loved by a child.

22. Watching a child grow.

23. Making a child laugh.

24. Making love to someone, or just feeling their skin against yours.

25. Being held by someone you love in the dark times.

26. Being held by someone you love in the good times.

27. A warm bed to sleep in.

28. Traveling to new places.

29. Traveling back to old places.

30. Learning something new.

31. Spending time in nature.

32. Mornings that will eventually feel light again.

33. Laughing with friends so hard that you can barely breathe.

34. Meeting one of your idols.

35. Writing something, a story, a song.

36. The feeling of gratitude for a family who loves you, or a chosen family.

37. A meal cooked by someone who loves you, or for someone you love.

38. The first warm day after a long winter.

39. The first cold day after a long summer.

40. Tasting something you will never forget.

41. An unforgettable experience with a friend.

42. Living in a city you’ve always dreamed of.

43. Being a good friend to someone.

44. Coming home to someone you love.

45. Road trips.

46. Walking in the rain, no umbrella, feeling the wetness on your face and body.

47. Someone thanking you for being the one who made a difference in their life.

48. Someone remembering the small thing you mentioned once, in passing.

49. The version of yourself a year from now, who knows something you don’t yet.

50. Looking back on your life with a wisdom you only get from living it, and realizing it wasn’t so bad after all.

For now, I’ll keep looking at the print and the sticker on my phone, and I’ll keep asking the question, on the hard days and the easy ones:

What if it all works out?

If you’re struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts, you’re not alone. Contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 (US), or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. To contact The Trevor Project, go to: thetrevorproject.org/get-help/

John Lennon said life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For me, life is what happens when you’re busy making lists, and I have never once functioned without one.

I write these lists on white notebook paper, then clip the sheets to a clipboard. I also write my lists in an old-school black pleather seven-ring organizer I’ve carried for decades. I restock it every year with a new calendar and a fresh pack of list-lined refill pages. When I can’t see paper pages in the dark, I write lists at 2 a.m. in the Notes app on my phone, because the thought “buy my cat her favorite Bonkers treats” will not let me sleep until it has officially been put on the list. I then print out the note in the morning and transfer it to a piece of paper because notes on my phone just isn’t enough to keep me organized, or let’s call it what it really is, sane.

I’ve been like this since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and my cousins will testify to it, because they remember our childhood well. When one of them mentioned Toni and her clipboard, it made me sound kind of loony. Every Sunday, we all piled into our cars with our moms and dads and headed to the big white house in New Haven, Connecticut where our Italian Nonnie lived, for a massive Sunday dinner that consisted of macaroni (they didn’t call it pasta back then), meatballs, sausage, and at least two other dead animals, and enough sides and Italian pastries and cookies to set up a wedding banquet for seventy five.

And while every other cousin ran for the green grassy long hill of a yard set aside a large vegetable garden, I showed up with a clipboard and an agenda. My cousin told me that the cousins used to hide from me because I had the whole day already planned. It looked something like this: Noon to 1 pm: Roll down the hill in a race. 2 to 3 pm: Play pretend in the attic. 3 to 3:30 pm: Sneak into the second floor hallway and play-jump-off-the-balcony. 3:30 to 4 pm: Play tag. Nobody had elected me Sunday Activities Director, but I’ve always been one to take charge. I just decided, at age seven, that unscheduled fun was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.

I even added a schedule for myself and my Nonnie in there, asterisks included. 4 to 5:30 pm: Eat dinner and *get there early to grab a meatball with sauce and a piece of bread. 5:30 pm: Remind Nonnie to hand out the cookies and candy bars.

After I had kids, I added a new and exciting gadget to the clipboard: a timer. When my kids were small and the house needed cleaning, I set up a timer for each room and turned cleaning into a game. It was like a race. “Ten minutes, dining room, go,” and suddenly my two kids were sprinting around like it was a game show, because a timer turns a chore into a competition, and nobody has ever once been able to resist a countdown, especially me. Clean house, no whining, and everybody thinks it was fun. My framework should be studied for books on parenting your kids into organized individuals. If I examine my adult kids, I notice that my daughter has lists all over the place but completing the tasks on time stresses her out. I wonder why. But my son? Totally organized. For him, it’s Excel documents. I take some credit for this.

And the list making has never left. It just grew up with me. Today its pages hold the entire range of my life with zero regard for hierarchy: shower, wash hair or make an appointment with Aliza for a blow dry; write syllabus; schedule mammogram; call my sister; buy Ani DiFranco tickets; find a shoe repair; check Kayak for discount business class tickets; contact cousin about Hamilton tickets. The list goes on and on.

For years I thought this was just a personality setting, like being someone who has to sleep with the closet door shut. (I do). It seemed harmless, and maybe a little intense, but looking back, I think the list started as something with higher stakes than a to-do.

I grew up in a house where the plans were never mine. We moved constantly, and not the good kind of moving where your dad gets a promotion and you get a bigger yard. For us, it was the kind where you came home from school and there were already boxes because your father had used up another town, or gotten into trouble with the cops, or the feds, or all three, and none of it had anything to do with a vote. Nobody, except maybe our mother, knew in advance what the plan was, and if there was one, it belonged to him, and it usually meant leaving in the middle of the night.

The list making, and checking off everything on it, calmed me. It still does. It makes me feel like my life is in order. Sometimes the time allotted is not enough for a task on the list, so I rewrite the times. Lots of crossing out, but for my organizer, I have another best friend: Wite-Out. I have a year supply of these small bottles, and the pages of my organizer paint a crazier picture than the words on them. I can’t stand to see things crossed out on these lovely, clean slate pages, so I use Wite-Out to erase a mistake, or a task put on the wrong day, or a change of plans. I blob that white sticky stuff all over the error, remove the page from the rings that hold it, and sit and fan the page until it dries. It doesn’t always dry, so there are a few pages that stick together, which results in me having to pull them apart which pulls off some of the paper. This makes it visually unacceptable, and also not a problem because I keep a backup calendar insert for emergencies. As I write this, I realize how crazy this sounds.

*Note: Add to list: Purchase 2027 calendar, inserts, list pages, Wite-Out.

I should add that there’s a specific moment at the end of every year that makes my body shudder with actual dread: adding the new year’s blank calendar pages into the organizer. I look at those pages and see a combination of possibility and dread. What will end up written there? Vacations or funerals? Coffee dates or chemo appointments? Or will I die before the year’s even over, leaving behind a notebook full of blank pages, the ultimate unfinished list?”

The clipboard at Nonnie’s was never really about a play date schedule. It was about the fact that I could decide what happened at one o’clock, and it would actually happen. Nobody was coming to change it. A list was the one square inch of my whole chaotic childhood where I got to be in charge of something, even if that something was suspiciously overlapping a sixty minute game of tag itinerary for a bunch of eight year olds who mostly just wanted a snack.

My life now is stable in ways it wasn’t back then. Nobody’s leaving town. Nobody’s showing up asking where my father is. And still, every single morning, there’s the list, showering and washing my hair wedged in next to write recommendation letter for student and call my sister. It’s just another task, and also a small daily ritual of proving to myself that the day will hold still. I’ve made peace with never being someone who trusts a day to behave on its own. I will always want it in writing.

So no, John, life isn’t what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For me, it’s really about what happens in the parts that never made it onto the list at all. That part, the part that stays in my head instead of on paper, is what keeps me up at night. The things I’m too afraid to put in writing like: add to our will’s final instructions music list to be played at my funeral,” Radiohead’s Videotape.”

Which just gave me another morbid list item. Date and time unknown: Take last breath. That thought alone makes me want to throw away my lists, or throw up.

Quick. Get the Wite-Out.

Mick Jagger said in a recent interview with the New York Times that there’s nothing good about getting older. As for the wisdom you’re supposed to gain, he put it this way: “I forgot all my wisdom. I might have had a couple of pearls drop, but I’ve already forgotten what they are.” Mick is quite a bit older than me, so maybe that’s true for him, but I have all of mine. Every last painful piece. I am a wise older woman with something to offer, and the ones who need it most are certain they already know better.

I learned what I know by making mistakes. Then making the same one twice, to be sure. Sometimes a third time, just to shame me straight. I made money decisions that still make my stomach drop when I remember them. I let deals sit on the table because I was scared, and watched other people pick them up and turn them into houses and successful investments.

Looking back now, the biggest lesson isn't any single decision. It's that every one of those mistakes got made under duress. Under stress, with what felt like a gun to my head, because I hadn't stopped to think it through, and by the time I realized it, I was already stuck living with it.

The only time I bought a house, it was with my ex husband, and the red flags were staring me straight in the face. I was in my early thirties and was too blind to see them. The truth is I saw them and chose to ignore them, because my heart wanted something more than reality was offering. I didn't want to see the bad stuff. The house was in the Hollywood Hills, up on a hill in Outpost Canyon, with a view of the Hollywood sign right from the master bedroom. It was dreamy. The nightmares were right there too, as plain as day, and I looked straight past them.

When escrow was about to close, we were told there was a problem holding up the sale. The woman who owned the house below ours was suing the company that owned the property, claiming the house was encroaching on her land. The story gets better. The company convinced us to move in and rent while they cleared things up, they promised. Why would we agree to that? Because we’d already given notice on our lovely rented house in Burbank, and I’d already packed. So we moved in.

During that time, after nearly a year of litigation between the company who owned the property and the woman below it, it was time to move forward. The home inspections turned up foundation problems. The house was slipping down the hill. And there was a strange buzzing sound in the quiet of the night. Bees. Thousands of them, an entire colony nesting inside the walls.

We got out of the sale and had to find somewhere to live, two kids in tow. Back to renting. We never bought another house, because we’d already burned through our borrowed (thanks mom) downpayment on legal fees, inspections, and rent. Lesson learned, and to say that one stung is both literal and true.

My list of mistakes and missed chances is long, and every single one taught me something I now know in the core of my being, the way you know not to touch a hot stove twice. Staying in relationships I should have left in the first year, not the twenty-second. Getting into the wrong relationships, especially business ones. Waiting to finish my bachelor’s degree until after having kids, when life was a lot more complicated. Not planning for the future because it was so far away, or so it seemed.

But the real wisdom dropped toward the end of my twenty-two-year second marriage, when I was already planning my exit strategy. I knew I had to take care of myself, and that the stress of running my own business was a gamble I wasn’t willing to make anymore. So I went back for my master’s degree, started teaching part time while doing public relations for a large PR firm, became a feature writer for the local daily paper, wrote a music column, and did a music segment on a morning radio show. All of it added up to one guarantee: I wouldn’t be the woman staring down a shutoff notice or unable to fix her car if it broke. I was getting wise fast. It didn’t take long before I was hired full time as a professor with lifetime benefits and a real salary.

I’ve been married to a doctor for twenty one years now, and he has always made a lot more money than me. But having my own salary, pension and health insurance is its own kind of freedom.

I just wish the knowledge had come sooner. Maybe that’s the real sting of wisdom built on a mountain of mistakes: watching people you love bury themselves under their own.

Some of the lessons I learned earlier than I wanted to, by watching my parents lose money they never had to lose, raising us like the next disaster was always a week out. It usually was. We never owned a home. My parents were terrible with money. We had nice cars, but some of them sat in the garage hiding from the repo man. Neither of my parents had gone to college, so an education wasn’t something they pushed on us.

Then our father died, and our mother found herself without a house, a savings account, or a college education. She was smart and wise enough by then, a woman in her early fifties, to know she was done making mistakes. She went to UCLA and became a paralegal. She moved up in administration at her job at a hospital, with a pension and real benefits, and got savvy with her money for the first time in her life. My sister and I admired her for it. We welcomed her wisdom with open arms.

My own wisdom? Tread lightly, because not everyone wants it.

And I have to say, this burns. Finally, after all that tuition paid in mistakes, I'm wise, just in time for the ones who need it most to think they know better. Some of the people I love ask, and I'm grateful for it. Others are certain they've already got it figured out, and I'm the one with the answers standing there anyway.

My best friend and I talk about this frequently, watching your kid walk straight into a decision you already survived, financial, romantic, whatever form it takes, and knowing exactly how it ends. Not guessing. Knowing. You’ve lived the scene before, you know every line, and still you have to sit in the audience and watch it play out. My sister said it best: “We’re so smart now, and they don’t want to listen.” We learned from all of it, and now we’re sitting on this pile of knowledge while our kids look at us like outdated software, like we haven’t already been exactly where they’re standing.

It’s almost funny, in a slapstick comedy kind of way. It’s like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. He knows exactly what's coming, keeps going anyway, and the fall is inevitable and expected every single time. That's basically this whole story in one image, watching someone walk toward an outcome you can already see.

Being a wise woman is hard work. It’s like working for a boss you know you’re smarter than and having to keep your ideas to yourself anyway. You’re full of knowledge you have to sit on, not out of defeat, but out of respect. Or self-preservation. Or probably both. I remember being twenty-something and rolling my eyes at my own mother’s warnings, not because she was wrong, but because the only way I was ever going to believe her was to feel it land on me first. I've still got the flattened-accordion bruises to prove it. Advice is information. A bad decision, lived through firsthand, is proof.

So I’m working on learning to zip it. Zip it good. Kind of like the Devo song, but with new words. Keep my mouth shut. I'm learning to watch people I love make the same money mistakes I made, and bite down on the urge to save them from a lesson that might be the thing that shapes them, or breaks them. I’m learning to keep quiet about the idea that college is a waste of time, knowing I would have given anything to have gone to college when I was younger. I don't know anyone who regrets getting an education, but I know plenty who wish they'd gotten one.

It doesn’t feel like wisdom, this silence. It feels like standing still while someone you love walks toward a wall. But maybe that’s the real final exam of being a wise woman. The collecting of the lessons is easy. Life hands them to you whether you want them or not. The exam is what you do once you have them. Can you hold a truth in your hand and not force it into someone else’s?

I don’t have this figured out yet. Some days I zip it beautifully and gracefully, like a woman who’s made peace with things. Other days, I scream into my pillow.

And then I think about my mother, not the version who had to borrow money to get the lights turned back on, or cover a bounced check, but the one she became after, the one who'd already paid for her wisdom. I think how badly I wanted her voice in my ear when I was drowning, and I wonder if someday the younger ones in my life will want mine too. Not now, not while they’re still proving something to themselves, but someday, at their own kitchen table, glass of wine in hand, notebook open, ready.

Until then, I zip it. Eyes closed, heart open, watching in complete horror.

There was a version of Joanne who existed before all of this, before the caregiving, the quiet rooms, the slow, patient tending to someone else's decline. That woman printed photographs of men she'd met online and pinned them to her office wall. She flew to Alaska once, to spend a week on a boat with a man she'd never met. She cancelled a 250-guest wedding just weeks before the event. She was, by every account, including her own, too much. Too loud, too opinionated, too scary. She still is, in flashes, when a story calls for it. But mostly now she is something else: patient in a way she never used to be, present in a way life eventually demands of anyone who loves hard enough. Devotion did that. So did time. And, finally, some hard-won wisdom.

She dreams of a future that combines her wild passion and her newfound peace, but for now, all of that other life waits. Her own story sits on a shelf, dusted off mostly in daydreams, while she tends to her mother’s instead.

Joanne is turning seventy this year, and she does not look it. She has shoulder length dark hair now, not the long, center-parted mane she wore in high school and through her twenties, when strangers used to stop her just to say she looked like Cher. That comparison belongs to a younger version of her, the one caught in old photographs. What she has now are dark eyes that miss nothing and a beautiful smile, one that can flip mid-story about her wild days into something almost sinister, like she is deciding how much of the truth you can handle.

She is still, unmistakably, a good-looking woman, and she carries a raunchy sense of humor that can reduce her best friend of more than fifty years to tears, the kind of laugh that makes you cross your legs. She calls herself a strega, the Italian word for witch, and it fits her better than any resemblance to a pop star ever did.

She is Italian in every way that matters. Her blood tells a longer story, one that starts in a town in the Campania region near Salerno called Giffoni Valle Piana. Her family came to the United States through Ellis Island into the Bronx, and finally out to Burbank, California, chasing a rumor her grandfather had heard about a good life out west. Her mother had five siblings, three older sisters, one younger, and an older brother who later became a public defender.

Her father was Cherokee, Irish, and Scottish, a Korean War veteran, and the son of a closeted KKK member. After his father died, he found the hood and burned it. That is her father's story in miniature: the old hatreds knocking at the door, and someone deciding to set them on fire instead of wearing them.

Joanne remembers her grandfather differently than his history might imply. She said he was gentle, the kind of man who would put her on his lap under a big tree and read book after book to her. It instilled in her a love of reading.

Joanne grew up in a family surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles, a house that was always loud, always full, always Italian even when the last name on the mailbox said otherwise. That kind of house makes a certain kind of woman, one who loves loudly, fights loudly, and feels everything at full volume, and Joanne is that woman through and through. She is the oldest of three sisters. Mary is two and a half years younger, and then Teri, eight years younger than Joanne.

Growing up, the fights between the three of them are the stuff of family legend now, the kind of stories that get retold at every holiday table. Joanne once got into a fight with Mary and threw a ceramic mug that opened a gash in her forehead deep enough for stitches. Joanne was eighteen at the time and Mary was barely sixteen, which meant the hospital reported it as assault on a minor. A deputy showed up at Joanne’s work to look into it. Luckily, he had siblings of his own and let her off the hook. Another fight with Mary involved a tube of toothpaste squeezed into Joanne’s hair. Her parents were tired of the shenanigans and made her go to high school that way.

Physical altercations were simply a normal part of growing up. Their father hit them too, not beatings exactly, but what Joanne calls “reactive hitting.”

“He once chased me over a mile to a friend’s house to give me a punishment, but he never caught me,” Joanne says. “He could pull out a belt faster than anyone.”

It is the kind of childhood that either breaks a person or toughens them into someone who can survive almost anything. Joanne became the second kind. And being the oldest meant she went first into everything else too.

First into kindergarten, where she remembers being terrified and teased. First into junior high, where three girls she'd believed were her best friends in the last part of elementary school, right before they were all supposed to move on together, sat her down and told her, with ice-cold cruelty, that they were no longer her friends. She never learned why. She only learned that it hurt in a way that stayed. Interestingly, two of these girls invited her to lunch when they were all in their fifties, to apologize. Joanne still didn't get an answer, just the two of them blaming each other.

It got worse before it got better. A fight with two older girls she’d trusted, over nothing, ended with Joanne coming home with a black eye and a split lip, and her parents deciding, in the way of that generation, that this was simply the street teaching her a lesson she’d have to learn alone.

“This wasn’t New York,” she says now, half laughing at the memory. “This was fucking Burbank.”

But something in her calcified that night.

“I think it made me really work on being nicer to people,” she says, “because I know what it was like to not have people be nice to you.”

One of those random acts of kindness is a story her best friend still tells. This girl who had just turned sixteen, wearing hot pants, walked into a Burbank High School classroom fresh from Miami, having left every friend she’d ever had behind. Joanne was the first person to talk to her. Like Joanne, her new friend came from an Italian family, and the two have been inseparable ever since. It is one of the very few times Joanne let herself trust a woman completely, and that trust has never wavered.

The funny thing is, that same friend was jumped by two girls in her first two weeks at the new school, putting her in the hospital with a concussion. Joanne, who had known her only a couple of weeks, sat with her at the hospital the whole time. She never once mentioned that something almost identical had happened to her just a year before.

“Maybe it was too soon,” she says. “Or maybe it’s just a case of moving on. I don’t like to go back to the bad times.”

That may be true, but Joanne admits it’s also self defense, a way of not revisiting the moments that changed her. Her junior high betrayal, she says, set the groundwork for not trusting women, a caution that would follow her for the next fifty years, surfacing even in friendships she wanted badly to believe in.

“It always surprises the hell out of me when I believe somebody, and then it turns out that they were lying to begin with,” she says. “And in the back of my mind I know they were lying, and I just keep saying to myself, ‘No, Joanne, they wouldn’t lie to you.’”

Her parents’ marriage was its own education. Her father strayed, and her mother stayed, the way a lot of women of that era stayed, not out of ignorance but out of some inherited belief that leaving wasn’t an option available to her.

Joanne understood divorce. Plenty of her friends’ parents had done it. What she couldn’t understand was why her own mother didn’t. When she finally stepped back and looked at it clearly, she saw a woman who had been told by her own sisters, in no uncertain terms, that you stay with the man. No further discussion. As for her father’s restlessness, Joanne says there’s always a why.

“I think it’s because of where my father came from. He was an independent man who ran his family’s household by himself, and then he becomes the grand master of his own family and becomes smothered.”

Joanne likes to say she turned out more like her father than her mother.

“I’m more like him—impatient, impulsive, capable of a certain hardness and tenderness,” she says. “He taught himself patience late in life.”

If you want to understand the shape of Joanne’s twenties and thirties, understand that she was, by her own description, easily swayed by men, and not without reason.

“I had the look,” she says. “I had money because I worked. I didn’t have the education, but I was independent.”

She was engaged in her early twenties and called it off weeks from a wedding with two hundred and fifty guests, walking away from the enormous machine of it because something in her refused to marry a man who didn't understand her commitment to family, and who, when it counted, wouldn't go to bat for her.

Then came Barry.

“He was so good looking,” she says. “I was gaga in love with him.”

They married six months to the day after they met and stayed married twenty years, though they only lived together for ten of them, which tells you something about the particular dynamic of that love. They had two sons together, Evan and James, and Joanne adopted a third, Preston, her husband’s boy from before, whose mother was fighting a brain tumor and eventually signed away her parental rights so Joanne could raise him properly. Joanne had been mothering him since he was three years old.

By the time Preston’s mother recovered, she had remarried, and Preston was over eighteen and in the Navy.

Before Evan, there was a daughter Joanne lost in her fifth month of pregnancy, a loss she still carries the way you carry anything that never got the chance to become a memory of its own.

The marriage to Barry cracked slowly and then all at once, undone by money, which, according to Joanne, “seems to be the standard in my fucking life with men.” And then there was the kind of fighting that left neither of them anywhere to stand. They tried therapy, but it didn’t take. She remembers the fights now as things that should never have been tolerated by either of them.

“I really was very much in love with Barry until that marriage became so fractured and broken,” she says.

Her son Evan, now thirty nine, had a front row seat to it all. James was too young to remember.

“Unfortunately, Evan has a photographic memory,” she says. “He should never have had to witness this.”

What remains, decades later, is something rarer than most divorces produce: a friendship. She talks to Barry nearly every day.

Joanne sees now how much of that fighting in her marriage with Barry was simply a replication of what she grew up with.

“I can remember my mother throwing a glass of milk at my father at the dinner table, but he didn’t fight back,” she says. “I think my father was afraid of my mother’s family. Very much like The Godfather.”

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Joanne built an entire career out of nothing but instinct and nerve. She rose to senior vice president in the aviation industry, a woman who could tell you what a plane could land on and what it couldn’t, the design limits of the plane, and everything you need to know about cabin safety. She counted Steve Jobs and the Clintons among her many high-profile clients, and was once on call around the clock for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s household.

“I think it was miraculous how far I went up the corporate ladder,” she says.

She is proudest, though, not of the title but of the people she pulled up with her, like the single mother working at an AT&T sales desk who Joanne spotted and mentored into a real career in aviation.

She was also, in those years, a single mother in Los Angeles doing what she now describes without flinching as some very wild things.

“I did very daring things in my forties and early fifties,” she says. “Very promiscuous things. I was on the quest for a boyfriend.”

Tuesday nights were date nights. She printed photographs of the men she met on early online dating sites and pinned them to the tufted walls of her office like a woman building a murder board. She says she mainly did this to entertain her young staff who were always interested in anything that had to do with dating. She also saw this as a safety net. The staff knew who she was with and where she was going.

“Of course, the morning after a date, the staff wanted to know all the gory details.

There was the man in Alaska, who she says resembled Grizzly Adams, a federal forestry agent who wrote and produced a documentary on brown bears for National Geographic.

“I was too citified for him,” she says.

There was the judge who handled mental illness cases and brought his golden retriever on every date with Joanne, which is ironic, given his line of work, since bringing a dog along felt a little unhinged. He'd had several dogs over the years, and always gave them the same name: Mattie.

There was the one with the gorgeous online profile who turned out to be living out of a van at a campground rather than the mansion he’d described, a man Joanne’s son Evan nicknamed Johnny Red Corn on sight.

And there was the one she obsessed over for a while, tall, older, funny, in the entertainment industry, with real kindness buried underneath. She even lived in his back house for a stretch. They were never quite compatible but remained friends.

These days, she's given some real thought to why she picked the men she did.

“Sex in my house growing up was a taboo subject,” she says. “It was never explained to me that a rational adult in a real and committed relationship means love and monogamy. For me, sex was just about getting off; giving your body to someone.”

She thinks she picked up a more male perspective of sex from watching her father navigate his marriage, and the woman who stood by and watched.

“I carried that through my entire adulthood,” she said.

That perspective found its clearest expression in an affair, one that has resulted in a different kind of reflection than the rest. He was married, older, and showered her with expensive hotel rooms and dinners. At the time, she thought it was love. Looking back now, she says it gave her something different, something more like a high.

“At no point in time did I ever think he would leave his wife,” she says. “And he never did.”

She wasn’t waiting for that ending. She understood, even then, what she was choosing. What she contemplates now isn't the affair itself so much as the arithmetic of it, a man's whole deception, the wife, children, and grandchildren he'd built a life around.

“I looked at that man more so than the wrongdoing on my part, and think, ‘How could you? How could you live like this?’”

It is a way of reasoning she’s honest enough to name for what it was: a cop-out, telling herself the sin belonged to him because he was the married one, and she wasn’t.

“It’s a cowardly cop-out,” she says now. “You can only live like that for so long before something horrible happens, or something wonderful happens.”

For Joanne, it turned out to be the second thing. Stuart, a former screenwriter, producer, and director, walked into her life, and the affair ended the way most borrowed things eventually do: for good. What drew her to Stuart was simple.

“He was tall, funny, kind, smart, and Jewish, and he could always make me laugh,” she said. He came into the marriage with two grown sons, Miles and Max, both of whom Joanne has grown close to.

They have been married sixteen years now. He is the one, out of everyone, who understood her most completely and loved what he found there without trying to change her. He came from a world so different from her loud, squabbling Italian family that it took him years to understand it, and longer still to love it. He studied at USC School of Cinema, and Occidental, worked alongside icons like Fellini, Lily Tomlin, Christopher Guest, and Tim Conway, wrote the 1987 hit comedy film Summer School, and was nominated for several film and television awards before turning his life toward helping people fight their way out of addiction.

Stuart’s own recovery decades ago set the foundation for that second career. He was on the cutting edge of therapies for heroin addiction, and his former clients will tell you the thing that stood out most about him was never just the expertise, but the compassion.

Joanne watched him build something out of other people’s worst days for years. But the rehab industry has changed, grown corporate in a way that pushed a certain kind of person out of the profession, and that shift is ultimately what drove him to leave it behind. He is a little broken now, the kind of breakage that comes from losing the very thing that gave your work its meaning, and Joanne knows it, even as her attention is pulled elsewhere by the person who needs her most.

Her mother is ninety two, deep in the fog of dementia, her hearing nearly gone. To care for her properly, Joanne rented out the beautiful home she and Stuart own, and moved in with her mother, trading her own independence for a smaller, quieter world with a very small footprint. It is the kind of sacrifice many Italian daughters know intimately, the assumption nobody ever has to say out loud, that you do not put your mother in a home. And being the oldest daughter brings the greater share of the responsibility with it. Her sisters each come by once a week to help, but Joanne is the one there around the clock, feeding her, bathing her, dressing her.

“It’s like taking care of a toddler all over again,” Joanne says. “My mother is incapable of making executive type decisions, so she resorts to being a child and not communicating her feelings.”

Joanne is, by her own word, housebound most days unless she can arrange care long enough to leave. The mother she knew is mostly gone.

“Ditch the ego and the anger,” Joanne tells herself, “and be compassionate to someone who is really not my mom anymore. She’s not the person that raised me and loved me.”

What she misses is specific: “I miss her laughter and her jokes, and her camaraderie. Let’s go shopping. Let’s surprise so and so. Let’s gossip. Let’s drink wine.”

What she values most these days is her relationship with her boys, one that has survived some genuinely rocky stretches and come out the other side.

“My relationship with my oldest son, Preston, is loving, though I don’t get the face time to hug him, to smell him,” she says.

Preston lives with his wife and children in the Pacific Northwest. Joanne wishes she could visit more often. Her other two sons live nearby.

“Evan and I have had our challenges throughout life, but he’s the one most like me, and the closest to me. He’s the most intuitive with me. James and I are lovingly respectful to each other. He’s the calm one.”

Then there are the grandchildren, four of them, who make her want to live forever. Two are Preston and Vanessa's daughters, both beautiful and smart. The other two are Evan and Ashleigh's: a three-year-old girl who greets her with a running list of pointed questions, like why her hair looks different today or whether what she's eating is healthy, the kind of unfiltered noticing only a small child gets away with, and a five-year-old grandson who loves her more quietly, plain and unguarded. “Nene, I love you,” he tells her, and something in Joanne softens completely at the name. The nickname came from her sister Teri, who, as a baby, called her Nene and it stayed.

Joanne and her sisters are close, and these days their only fights are over who bowled the highest score when they get together at the local bowling alley, one of the few outings their mother can still enjoy. Dementia has taken a lot from her, but not her spirit of rooting for the underdog.

This slower season has left room for digging, and Joanne has done a lot of that through therapy. It started after a violent fight with one of her kids pulled every bit of ugliness and rage and confusion in her straight to the surface.

“I never wanted it to happen again,” she says. “It was something out of an alien. I knew I needed help so I started therapy.”

Joanne’s therapist told her to look for the messages. It has become something close to a mantra.

“How the fuck am I here?” she asks herself. “Where’s this big message I’m supposed to find?”

She thinks she already knows part of the answer, watching her mother fade: “Do not end up like this. Do not be this person. Do everything possible, by every means, to fight it."

She watched her own father fight to the very end, holding his hand as he took his last breath at ninety two.

"He did not want to go," she says. "And that's the way I want to leave this earth — not wanting to leave it."

So now Joanne waits, and thinks, and reflects. She still wants the whole rest of it. A house by water somewhere with a garden, something entirely her own. To be madly and passionately in love again, and to do the things she loves—swim, hike, garden, and maybe, she says, even that stupid bungee jump exercise thing.

“I want to be known as that seventy year old that can and did,” she says.

After nearly seven decades on this earth, underneath all of it, is the girl who sat under a tree on her grandfather’s lap while he read to her, the one who fell in love with books before she fell in love with anything else. She still reads constantly, and she is always the first one to tell you about whatever she just finished. Her favorites are Charlotte’s Web and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and she laughs at the fact that both are stories about someone living on a farm surrounded by animals.

Joanne loves her pets the way some people love their own children. Her pit bull, Eddie, recently crossed the rainbow bridge, and she still talks about him like family.

“He was a human in a dog suit,” she says. “He was a son. He was my cohort in crime. My drinking buddy. The protector of my chickens. The protector of me.”

These days there is Kiwi, a cockatiel who imprinted on her the moment he tumbled out of a box of six siblings and has been devoted ever since.

“He can hear me drive up in the driveway,” she says.

And there is Charlie, her most recent rescue, a mixed terrier who leapt into her arms the first time they met and has not left her side since.

“There’s some underlying message I give out to these animals,” she says. “It’s a cherished gift. I’m a steward of their lives.”

That description fits Joanne perfectly, well beyond the animals. She takes in everything that needs taking in, stray chickens, stray dogs, and more than a few stray people. She has lost count of how many of her sons’ friends have landed on her couch when they needed somewhere to go. Her best friend still tells the story of the time she was going through a divorce and Joanne handed her a set of keys to her house and, as she puts it, carte blanche to all the salami and wine inside.

“I guess I just like helping people,” Joanne says. “I like having people around the house.”

As for that girl under the tree, she never really left. And neither did the wild one who came after her.

“Before the kids, I was just a big kid,” she says, and something in her still is, somewhere underneath the caregiving and the worry and the small rooms she now moves through. You can hear it when she talks about her son Evan’s fearlessness on a skateboard when he was younger, because she recognizes it. It was hers first. James, her younger son, gave her something different.

“I’ve learned through James mostly, about boundaries and respecting people’s decisions that I don’t necessarily align with,” she says.

He is the gentler side of her, the one she is still learning from. As for what her kids think of Joanne's decades of learning and growth, she has her own take.

“I think my kids would describe me as a never-ending adventure,” she says.

Recently, her son Evan told her that their life was confusing, their house was confusing, but that she did her best. She was holding down everything, providing for her children, all while working an incredibly stressful job.

“I must have done something right because my kids are amazing young men with amazing families and in relationships that are healthy and sound,” she says. “They’re not afraid to dig in and get shit done, and they’re always there when I need them.”

One lesson she keeps returning to is: “Be careful how you live your life, because sometimes things that you think are just for you really aren’t. They have a domino effect. And the things that you think bring you joy can sometimes be devastatingly hurtful to someone else.”

So she keeps moving, one more chapter, maybe two or three, badass enough to still believe it’s coming, looking for the message hiding inside whatever comes next.

I’ve never done drugs, but I often compare my obsession, or maybe it’s an addiction, to New York City. I arrive and the high kicks in, the way I imagine the harder drugs must feel, and like an addict, the moment I return home, I need another fix.

Los Angeles is where I live, and I love it here. The beaches, the weather, the tacos that ruin you for tacos anywhere else. But New York is a different relationship entirely. I once saw a sign that read: “New York is my boyfriend.” I laughed, because I knew the rest of the sentence. “New York is my boyfriend, and Los Angeles is my husband.” LA gives me peace, comfort, space, fresh air, and freedom. It loves me completely, satisfies me, and asks for nothing. New York throws me on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet, runs every red light, keeps me out bar hopping until sunrise, then spits me out and sends me back to LA where I can get the rehab I need. I'm sober for a while, and then the craving starts, and I'm booking flights again.

My New York habit started young, and I know exactly who got me hooked: my mother.

We were living in New Haven then, one of the many in-betweens of our lives, depending on where my father was in his “businesses.” My mother had been a dancer in New York, and every so often she’d take me on the train into the city to see a play or, if it was holiday season, Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes. Going to New York required dressing up. Mom would wear her best dress and high heels, even though we’d be walking the city all day. She wore them as comfortably as tennis shoes. I wore one of my fancy dresses with patent leather shoes. I’d press my face to the window of the train as Manhattan rose up out of nowhere, crazy tall, crazy loud, crazy everything. It was so big for a little girl, and I loved every minute of it.

We’d eat at some restaurant she remembered from when she’d lived there, usually grabbing sandwiches you couldn’t find in New Haven. She loved a Monte Cristo — ham and cheese dipped in egg batter and fried golden like French toast and dusted with powdered sugar. It was more of a dessert than a sandwich. I’d order something American like a BLT, because in New Haven, ninety-eight percent of what we ate was Italian. We always ordered some ice-cream-and-soda-water concoction to drink.

But what I remember most is watching my mother watch the city. She had lived inside it once, danced inside it, and seeing New York through her eyes made it more than a place. It was a former life, and it made sense to see my mother there, because she was always as lit up as New York.

I was born in Miami but raised for a while among our Italian family in New Haven, who had come from Italy to New York before settling in Connecticut. I was fifteen when we moved to Los Angeles, and I’ve been here ever since. I am more than grateful for all the years of sandy beaches and sunshine, but gratitude is not the same as desire.

For years I traveled back and forth to New York on business because our magazine publisher was there, and every single trip, I’d walk those tree-lined streets in the shadow of those tall buildings and think: I have to live here. Why don’t I live here? The rivers, the cafés, the smells (yes, even those), the vibe. New York has a pulse you can feel through the soles of your shoes. Los Angeles has a heartbeat too, but you have to drive three freeways and at least one winding canyon to find it.

The strangest part about New York is that it’s the only place on earth where I feel fearless.

This is interesting in itself, because I’m a person who seriously fears death. In my quiet town in Los Angeles, twenty minutes from Malibu, all palm trees and bumblebees, I have plenty of time to think about dying. LA gives you space, and I fill that space with dread. But in New York, there’s never any time. I’m too busy. Too alive. And on the rare occasion the thought of death crosses my mind on a Manhattan sidewalk, I feel an odd relief knowing an ambulance is seconds away. In LA, everything is twenty minutes away, at least forty in traffic, including my rescue.

The sleep tells the same story. In Los Angeles, in the silence, I rarely sleep. I’m up for hours in the dark, thinking. In New York, I sleep like a baby. Taxi horns and ambulance sirens lull me to sleep. My husband understands this completely. He agrees that I was made to live in New York City. It has everything I need: good food, great fashion, culture, an exciting nightlife, and the best hospitals.

My husband, a native New Yorker who moved to LA decades ago for medical school and never left, was offered a job at a hospital in Brooklyn. This was our chance to live in New York.

I took a leave of absence from my tenured college teaching position, packed up my LA life, and moved in with my husband, and my boyfriend. The two get along well.

It was one of the best years of my life. But first, I had to get there.

He started three months before me, so while I stayed behind in LA closing the sale of our house, we flew back and forth to be together. I’d found him a sublet on the Upper East Side, on the fourth floor of an eight-story building on a tree-lined street. It was a studio with glass doors that opened to a bed set against windows overlooking the trees, the cafés, and the shops. I loved visiting him there, right up until I saw my first cockroach. Where there’s one, there are many, and they started popping up everywhere. In a bag of potato chips on the counter. In the silverware drawer. On the walls of the elevator. That was it for the sublet. I hired a real estate agent, a gorgeous designer-dressed blonde, and to say that she understood me is an understatement.

She showed me three apartments. The first was one of the most beautifully restored brownstones I have ever seen. I was ready to sign the lease in the doorway, but she assured me there were two more to see. The second was a high-rise where Aida Turturro—Janice from The Sopranos — was walking out as we were walking in. Impressive lobby and impressive residents. And then we arrived at the last one, on the Upper East Side. We stepped into the elevator and she pressed the button. P.

Yes. P. For penthouse.

Anyone who knows me knows I am probably the biggest Sex and the City fan to walk the planet. Try me. I can practically recite every episode, and yes, I’ll even defend the two movies. And here I was, standing in the first movie. I was Carrie, and my Mr. Big was at the hospital and couldn’t come with me. She opened the doors and I lost all feeling in my legs. Floor-to-ceiling windows holding what looked like all of New York City. And then I turned to the right, and there it was: the 59th Street Bridge.

You have to understand about this bridge. My cousins Denice and Lucia, longtime New Yorkers who actually had a car, used to take my sister and me on wild adventures around the city, several of which involved hunting for the bridge from Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. Keep in mind this was pre-Google. It took us multiple trips to figure out it was the 59th Street Bridge. And now here it was. Literally in my face. I may have died several times that day.

It was a two-bedroom with a large living room, a full kitchen, and a balcony that wrapped around the entire apartment.

I called my husband to ask him about leasing the apartment. His answer, about our own heaven on 65th, was pure Mr. Big: “I got it.”

For one year, that wraparound balcony was mine. I stood out there at night with the city lit up below me like spilled champagne. On sunny days, I dragged big fluffy pillows outside and lay right on the balcony floor, the skyline above me. I drank coffee out there in the mornings and prosecco at night. And every single time I came home and opened that door, I gasped and said out loud: Oh my fucking god, I live here.

I didn’t have to ration my fix. I mainlined New York daily.

Los Angeles has its own stories, and they usually involve celebrity sightings, or overhearing someone at a café talk about their next acting part or the script they’re writing. But my best celebrity story is an LA-in-NY moment. My husband and I were at Orso in the theater district, one of those long, narrow restaurants where the next table is practically in your lap, and two guys were smashed in next to us. One of them was on the phone, talking loudly about a new movie. Across from him was Lorne Michaels. I said to my husband, sarcastically: “I might as well be in LA. Obnoxious!”

And then it happened. A third man walked in wearing a hat and a coat, sat down with them, and ordered pea soup. He began to speak, and I realized this man was one of my idols, Steve Martin.

I tried to signal to my husband between labored breathing that Steve Martin was sitting next to us, but the doctor in him decided I was having a heart attack. Are you alright? he kept asking. When I finally got the message across, he also received the second message: we would be ordering everything on the menu if necessary to stay in their world until they paid the check. So we lingered and listened. They talked about how Tina Fey is more beautiful than people give her credit for. They talked about Meryl Streep and a new movie Steve was working on with her.

I know this sounds like just another celebrity sighting, but in New York, it’s different. In LA, a sighting is an occurrence, something that creates a paparazzi stir. And you rarely run into people like Steve Martin anyway. The Kardashians, yes, but rarely The Jerk himself. And it’s usually at a place like Erewhon. The real difference, though, is that in LA, that’s the moment of the day. In New York, all the moments are memorable. Every day, from the second you leave the apartment until you get home.

One evening during Fashion Week, I left the apartment for a walk, passed some event, and was asked if I’d like to come in. Just like that. Free champagne, models, and more celebrity faces than I could count. In LA, to get into an event like that, you’d need to be not only on the guest list but ready to hand over a copy of your investment account. And that’s the glamorous version. Think Steve Martin’s LA Story.

On the normal days, I sat in cafés and had conversations with some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. The older grey-haired woman with twin gothic models in tow, who told me they were all modeling for a new brand. The cab driver who told me the story of his life, how he’d fled a war-torn country for New York, but dreamed of LA. The woman I met at a church who told me stories of a haunting; I swear the lights flickered as she spoke. There are hundreds of these stories, all living in my New York state of mind. New York is old, but it’s new. It has buildings older than the Palm trees lining Sunset Boulevard, yet every single day is new. A new restaurant to try. A new cocktail made especially for you. A new story. A new friend.

The people are kind, and the neighborhood quickly becomes home. Within the first two weeks of living there, everyone from the doorman to the bagel guy to the woman who pours the wine at the local bar knows your name, your story, and what you order.

Then the year ended, the way years do. We had talked about staying, which meant me giving up my job, my tenure, my lifetime benefits. But the day we knew we were going home was the day we stood in the freezing cold in front of the PacSun store, watching its floor-to-ceiling video of Malibu on a loop, surfers and beach dwellers glowing in the warm sun, two people shivering in front of a commercial for their own life.

We looked at each other and said it out loud: I miss LA. It was time. Or maybe we just knew it had to end. LA is better for us, we told ourselves.

So I came home to my husband, my city. Back to the beaches and the space and the tacos and the comfort and the peace and the unconditional love. Back to rehab, or as we call it in Los Angeles, spa day.

People ask me why I don’t just move there for good. It’s a fair question, and I’ve thought it over on many of those sleepless LA nights. Maybe the honest answer is that I’m afraid the marriage wouldn’t survive the affair becoming permanent. Maybe New York is only New York to me because I always have to leave it, because the high depends on the withdrawal. Maybe if I lived there year-round, I’d start noticing the noise and the slush and the garbage in July, and my boyfriend would slowly turn into somebody’s husband, the kind they’re thinking of divorcing.

Nah. That would never happen.

I need the sirens and the smell of the garbage and the noise and the heartbeat of New York, and I need the beach and the sunshine and the plastic-fantastic of LA.

The truth is, I need both in my life. And it turns out, I need both in death.

I’ve planned for the end. When my husband and I were writing our wills, I told him I want a New York death. I asked him, the doctor with access to the best drugs, if he learns I’m dying of an incurable disease, shoot me full of a killer drug and let me go out on the streets I love. Take black-and-white pictures of me. Hold a service where the photo slideshow plays to Madonna’s “I Love New York.” Then cremate my drug-filled body, fly me back to LA, and release my ashes into the ocean off Malibu, where I can rest in peace, while Joni Mitchell’s “California” plays.

Some people spend their whole lives searching for the one. I found two, and I’m keeping them both.

My husband tried retirement. It lasted about as long as a waiting room magazine.
At night he was doing colonoscopies in his sleep, hands moving, working, diagnosing. Even in a deep sleep, he couldn't stop.

He’s back for two half days, one in the office and one at a hospital, and one half day at another hospital where he teaches the medical students. This earned him two white coats, because apparently one was never going to be enough. Factor in the family and friends he consults for across California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Connecticut and New York, plus a 99-year-old Calabrian family member we call Nonna at a local retirement home who says the only one she trusts is “Doctor Michael.” Part time is a generous description and nobody who knows him is surprised.

His brother had asked the question when Michael was considering retirement that cut closest to the bone: What will Michael be without his white coat? Turns out, we found out. He had no idea.

That’s the thing about being a doctor that nobody talks about when they’re handing you the piece of cake and the plaque at the farewell party. The coat isn’t clothing. It’s a self. That coat walks in and everyone sits up straighter. It’s the reason conversations stop, faces turn, and smart, capable, accomplished people wait for the verdict. They wait for the words that will restructure their entire week, and maybe their entire life.

Doctors are rockstars. Not the messy kind who trash hotel rooms, but the kind who command a room without trying. Everyone is already seated when they arrive. The diagnosis is the production. The rounds are the tour. And like any rockstar worth the stage, they start to believe that the applause is just the sound the world makes.

My ex-husband needed the stage too. His coat was a leopard jacket and his stethoscope was a bass guitar slung over his shoulder. Take away the crowd and he didn't know who he was either.

I’ve watched it happen to doctors we know, retirement party after retirement party. The ones who stop working split neatly into two camps. Neither is what you’d call peaceful.

One friend didn’t just retire but also surrendered his medical license. He closed the door completely and now spends his days wondering why he left. “No one cares what I have to say anymore,” he told us recently, with a bluntness that landed like a small punch. He used that word, the one that haunts people who spent their whole careers being indispensable: relevant. He doesn’t feel it and probably hasn’t since the day he let his medical license expire.

Then there’s the one who retired but can’t quite leave. He shows up at the hospital most days, not to work, but just to be there. He walks the halls, grabs coffee in the break room, lingers near the nurses’ station. He’s not on call and he’s not consulting. He just needs to be in the building.

And then there are the ones who retired and promptly got sick. Or died. It happens with a frequency that is either coincidence or what happens when something essential is taken away from a person. The body, apparently, pays attention. We’ve lost too many that way. Doctors who survived decades of impossible hours and impossible decisions, undone by the very rest they spent their careers earning.

Which brings me to Michael’s close friend who is approaching 80 and recently signed a ten-year lease on a new medical office. His mind is as keen as it ever was, and he has a reputation for cracking the cases that leave everyone else stumped. He didn’t consult the statistical tables when he signed that lease. He consulted his gut, and his gut said to keep going.

These doctors cling to their white coats and stethoscopes like passengers gripping the last lifeboat, not because they’re afraid of the water, but because they’ve forgotten there’s a shore.

But this phenomenon is more complicated than ego. Both of these men are still teaching, still shaping the doctors who will outlast them. That changes the calculus entirely.

Once a week, Michael stands in front of medical students and teaches them not just technique, but how to think, how to sit with uncertainty, how to fight for a patient, how to carry the weight without being crushed by it. And he’s not doing it for the money. He made his living in the good old days, when medicine was still medicine and doctors ran the show. Now he’s operating inside the big corporate machine that healthcare has become, and he’s actually losing money. The teaching pays nothing but he shows up anyway.

Why? Because what he’s afraid of losing can’t be found in a database or a protocol. It’s judgment and instinct. The ability to look at a patient and know something the tests haven’t confirmed yet. The gut feeling that something is wrong before the labs confirm it. The thing he desperately wants these new kids on the block to know: that this profession was never supposed to be about the money in the first place.

And then there's the question he can't let go of:

Who will take care of us when we’re all gone? He means it literally.

And underneath the teaching, there’s something else, something that has poisoned the joy of medicine even as they refuse to leave it. The system has changed. If you want to see my husband furious in the way that only someone with fifty years of self-control can be, put him on the phone with an insurance administrator who has just denied his patient a necessary procedure. It happens constantly. A doctor with five decades of experience, overruled by someone on the other end of a phone line with a checklist and a mandate to cut costs. The patient waits and sometimes deteriorates, and the doctor who actually examined the patient has to explain why the answer is no.

The administrators don’t examine anyone. They don’t wake up at 3 a.m. yet they hold the keys to a patient’s life.

This is what the younger generation is inheriting, which is why Michael and his colleagues feel such urgency about what they’re passing down. Not just here is how you diagnose this but here is how you fight for your patient when the system tells you not to bother. They try to tell these young doctors how to stay a doctor when the system is trying to turn them into a billing code.

But enough about the system. Let's talk about the winery.

I went to my high school reunion with my best friend and her husband. We were in the modern dance club together and we hung out with rock musicians and low riders, so we weren’t exactly a part of the popular social butterfly crowd who ran the school. But we’d done pretty good since. She was now the vice president at an aviation company and I was an accomplished professor. We still looked good and figured we’d pull a Romy and Michelle, walk in, own the room and collect our long-overdue moment.

We walked into the banquet and the shouting started immediately, but not for us.

Dr. Albertson! Over here!

Former patients everywhere. One owned a winery and was personally pouring Michael the best bottles she had, the kind of wine that doesn’t appear on menus, the kind you have to know someone to drink. And then came the stories.

The man who said Michael caught something on a routine scope that nobody else had thought to look for. You saved my life. The woman who had been dismissed by three other doctors before Michael sat down, actually listened, and figured out what was wrong. You gave me my life back. The one who had been terrified and had put off coming in for years, and whom Michael had talked through the fear with such patience that she finally showed up, and it was a very good thing she did. I wouldn’t be here without you. On and on it went. Glass after glass of the good wine. Story after story, my husband standing there, smiling, remembering details about each of them.

My best friend, the aviation executive, and I, the professor, sat with our glasses filled with whatever cheap crappy wine came with the overpriced reunion ticket.

We had wanted our Romy and Michelle moment. We got a standing ovation, just not for us.

And here’s the thing I couldn’t be annoyed with. Every single one of those people meant it. This wasn’t chit chat. These were people who remembered the exact appointment, the exact words, the exact moment when someone in a white coat looked at them and knew what to do, when the verdict came and it was the right one.

The coat wasn’t even there that night. He didn’t need it.

And here’s the other thing nobody tells you when you marry a doctor. They don’t clock out. Not even at 35,000 feet with a glass of champagne in hand.

Twice on planes the announcement has come over the intercom. Is there a doctor on the flight? You’d think a man on vacation might hesitate. Might finish his drink. Might let someone else handle it. Instead, Michael hits the call button faster than I can down my free champagne. The first time, a woman with a cardiac issue. He was calm, steady, already in physician mode before I’d processed what was happening. The second time was a man who couldn’t leave the lavatory. He was vomiting with diarrhea that resulted in the closure of the restroom. Drunk at altitude. For my husband, a gastroenterologist, it was just another Wednesday. For me, it was a full hazmat situation upon arrival at the hotel.

But he ran to both of them, like Superman answering a call that only he can hear.

In Hawaii, we stepped into an elevator. A young man stood next to us in a Hawaiian shirt, and before the doors had fully closed, Michael glanced at his arm and said, Shark bite? The guy stared at him. Yeah. How the hell did you know that? Michael shrugged. I just know.

He just knows. He always knows. An elderly woman collapsed on a street in New York and Superman, again, scooped her up and brought her to safety before the rest of us had registered she’d fallen. He is never not working, never not scanning, never not diagnosing, The physician brain doesn’t have an off switch.

Put on a medical drama in our house and the TV might as well be a patient. He calls the diagnosis out loud and he's right almost every time. Dr. House built a career on that. Michael just calls it from the couch.

And then there’s what Michael calls the cloak of invisibility.

The white coat, it turns out, is not just an identity but a master key. Doors that are closed to everyone else open without question. He can walk into a radiology suite mid-read and the technician turns the screen toward him without being asked. He can access floors, files, colleagues, information, the coat preceding him like a credential nobody thinks to challenge. The world parts for a man in a white coat.

It has even gotten him out of a traffic ticket. He was still wearing it when the officer pulled him over. The officer took one look, handed back the license, and waved him through. I’m not saying that’s how the system should work; I’m saying that’s how the system does work.

Superman has the cape. Michael has the coat. The difference is Superman is fictional. Take the coat away and you’re just a man in traffic, waiting like everyone else.

But nothing illustrated who Michael is quite like Valley Fever.

Valley Fever is a fungal disease that invades the lungs and can kill you. It nearly did. He lost 40 pounds, couldn’t walk, and ended up intubated in the ICU, which is where a group of young doctors found him with his laptop balanced on his chest, pulling up his own X-rays, studying them with the curiosity of a man reviewing someone else’s interesting case. They stopped, looked at him for a long moment, and I heard one of them say: Now that’s something you don’t see every day.

It is in our house.

What these young doctors didn’t know was that before they intubated him, while he was flat on his back on steroids and barely able to breathe, he was on the phone with New York. This was the moment when he was choosing to leave private practice and transition to an academic institution, deciding between two positions at two major hospitals, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. He chose New York, which meant we’d be returning to the city where both our families began, the city we love. He negotiated the details from his sickbed. He made deals while the IV dripped. He chose the city, chose the hospital, chose our future, and then they wheeled him into ICU. Several weeks later after leaving rehab, he was on a plane to New York.

As I write this, even I have to stop and take it all in. Just weeks after ICU and a rehabilitation center where he learned to walk again, he was hopping subways to Brooklyn before I’d finished unpacking.

And here’s what drove him there. Not ambition, not ego, not the need to prove something after nearly dying. The patients in that culturally diverse community in Crown Heights had been waiting months for procedures. He showed up and turned the entire program around, working long hours until every patient had been seen, walking the fellows through every step, teaching at the same relentless dedication he always has, the phone calls coming at all hours, carefully explaining and questioning.

I'd lie awake listening and think that not too long ago, this man was in the ICU on a respirator fighting for his life. Is he even human? And then came the farewell celebration for the fellows and I had my answer. Maybe I really had married Superman.

He’d only been there a few months, barely enough time to learn which subway to take, but the fellows gave speeches about what Dr. Albertson had meant to them. Not polite, obligatory speeches but real ones, the kind where you can tell the person means every word.

After the banquet, four of them insisted on driving us back from Brooklyn to Manhattan. They piled into the car laughing like a group of wild Bohemians who’ve been through something hard together and had come out the other side, all talking medicine and telling stories. The young doctor behind the wheel took the Brooklyn Bridge like he'd just finished a grueling fellowship and was invincible. He had.

When we finally got out, my knees shaking and my knuckles white from gripping the door handle, Michael turned to me, still lit up from the inside, and said: Nothing will ever beat the high this gives me.

I keep asking Michael if he’ll ever slow down. If he’ll travel without scanning the cabin for medical emergencies and take a vacation that is actually a vacation. If he’ll let go and just have fun.

This is fun, he says.

This honestly is its own kind of diagnosis. Because the 3 a.m. call, the denied procedure, the drunk man in the lavatory at 35,000 feet, the student who finally understands something, the patient who gets better, is never a burden. It’s evidence that he’s still the person the room waits for. Still needed. Still known. Still the one who just knows about the shark bite before anyone says a word.

The coat was never just a coat. It was always a cape. And the cape doesn’t hang in the closet or get folded up and put away when the vacation starts or the retirement party ends or the ICU makes it clear that you’re the patient this time.

He recently told me that without medicine, he’s just circling the drain. I considered this and then it struck me. He’s never had to confront the question that consumes so many of us: Who am I and why am I here? For Michael, that was settled a long time ago.

But out here, in the ordinary world, these doctors, the ones who gave everything to medicine and expected nothing back, don’t know who they are without it.

Just human. And that, it turns out, is the one condition none of them know how to treat.

There’s something nobody tells you about becoming a grandmother. The guilt goes quiet. Not forever and not all at once, but in those first moments when you’re holding a baby who looks at your face like it’s the only face in the world and the noise in your head just stops. I had carried guilt for so long I thought it was part of my personality. Guilt about the years I stayed in a marriage when I should have left, about what my daughter watched me absorb. Guilt about working and having to be away from my children. Guilt about anything and everything I could have done better.

Then this small person arrived and looked up at me and none of that was in the room. It was just the two of us and his tiny face and my heart cracking open in the best way it ever had. I didn’t feel terror, which surprised me. When I held his father, my son, I was nineteen and so afraid of breaking him that I held my breath for what felt like months. This was nothing like that. This was my heart getting bigger than I knew it could get.

It took me a long time to name what I was feeling. It was love with nothing to fix. For me, that was new.

I had been a fixer my whole life. My mother told me so, and said it out loud when I was young. What I didn’t understand then was that she had handed me something heavier than a compliment. She taught me, without meaning to, that love is a problem you solve. That showing up means having an answer. That if someone you love is in pain and you aren’t doing something about it, you aren’t really loving them at all.

I come from a long line of women who got it wrong before they got it right.

My grandmother, we called her Granny, was a hillbilly from West Virginia who could make a room full of people fall down laughing with a single limerick. As a grandmother she was pure warmth, bony hands holding mine tight on the bus to the five-and-dime, root beer and hamburgers at the lunch counter, small plastic treasures purchased that made a little girl feel like the whole world was centered around her.

But she hadn’t always been that woman. She came from an abusive father and a mother who stayed. She married a man who was no better, mean and stingy, who she finally left after learning that his family had shut her daughter in a closet during dinner. She worked two jobs and made desperate choices, and one of them was leaving my mother alone on the front stoop at six years old while she went out chasing the man she loved. The neighbors would take my mother in for dinner. A little girl at someone else’s table, watching the door. My grandmother eventually married this man, and my mother loved him so much she took his last name as her own.

But this is how it starts. Not with monsters, but with women doing the best they could with what they had and the children who paid for it.

My mother survived all of that and built something steadier. She showed up before she was called. She covered our rent and utilities when we were short, bought groceries, and gave advice we actually took because she’d earned the right to give it. The night I was robbed, I chased two strangers out of our house in my underwear, barefoot, while my husband lay in bed screaming. I made two phone calls: one to the police and one to my mother. She got there first.

That was love as I understood it. Loud and warm, consistent and daily. And because she loved that way, I believed that love involved a rescue or a fix, something you could always do more of if the person you loved was still hurting.

She was the one who held things together, smoothed things over, made things right. And if something ever happened to her, that job was mine. She told me so when I was about ten. “If you want something done, ask Toni Ann to do it.” I believed her and I was good at it. I just didn’t know yet the effect it would have on me.

My son is five years older than my daughter. My son's father — my first husband— related to both my kids in ways my second husband never could. He was silly, and thoughtful, and always showed up, whether or not the child in front of him was his own. My second husband, my daughter's father, was missing the dad gene. When she was born he was distant, and as she entered her preteens, his expressions of love came through words swimming in alcohol.

My son left for college at eighteen, and by the time his stepfather’s drinking years settled in, he was already building his own life.

My daughter had a front-row seat to everything he missed.

I stayed for twenty-two years. I told myself I was holding things together. That was the fixer talking. What I was actually doing was modeling, for a girl who was watching every day, that this was what love looked like. That you absorbed the damage and you hoped it wouldn’t reach the children.

It always does.

There is a photograph I keep coming back to. My daughter and I in matching velvet dresses and hats, on our way to see The Phantom of the Opera. She is around ten and she is beaming, right next to me, exactly where she wanted to be. We went to plays together and held hands. When I traveled for work, she made me a small bottle filled with folded notes and trinkets, pieces of herself, so I’d have something to hold while I was gone. When she was eighteen, we went to New York together, stayed in an apartment with naked art on the walls, and she sat on the fire escape and wrote in her journal while I watched her and thought: This is it. I love being with her. Alone.

I would give anything to go back to that girl and fix all the wrongs. And there it is again. Fix. Even now.

Her second marriage was to a man who, if my father were alive, would be wearing cement shoes. I watched her move through those years the way I had moved through mine. I wanted to reach in and solve it. I didn’t know how to just be there without trying to rescue her, to fix everything. I come from the kind of Italian family where a single phone call could make a problem disappear, and I'd be lying if I said I never thought about dialing.

She got out in five years. Five years to my twenty-two. She was smarter than me, or maybe she’d just watched long enough to know how the story ended. She now has a good man, the kind of stepdad who relates to her kids on their level, who makes each of them their favorite meal and delivers it like a four-star restaurant. Who can talk vintage technology with one while they build a computer together, then pick up a guitar and sit in on a band practice with the other. He has made it clear that no one makes his wife cry, not on his watch. Maybe it's the Italian DNA that makes him so protective of this family. It also makes him a man of his word. This is the man who promised me a granddaughter long before she was born.

I am in my third marriage too. I found my own good man, one who adores my kids and our grandchildren and asks for nothing in return. I finally got that part right.

And still, my daughter and I keep finding our way.

She doesn’t want to revisit the past and go deep. I don’t know any other way. I want to curl up on the sofa with her and hold her tight. She doesn’t like public displays of affection. She likes her privacy. I wear my life on my sleeve for all to see. Once, when I told her all I wanted was to hug her, to tell her daily how much I love her, to have what I had with my own mother, she said: “Mom, you want a different daughter.”

Ouch.

She wasn’t wrong about the wanting, but what I want isn’t a different daughter. What I want is to fix any distance between us, to solve it, to find the right combination of words or gestures that closes it for good. That’s the fixer again, dressed up as longing. Maybe what she needs isn’t someone with answers. Maybe she needs me to put the toolbox down and just sit with her in the room. Maybe she needs me to just chill. Anyone who knows me knows that chilling has never been my specialty.

My mother believed in redemption. She believed that everyone deserved a second chance, or a third, or maybe even a fourth. Mine came in the form of four grandchildren. It started the moment I held the first one and felt my heart grow without having done a single thing to earn it.

I chose the name Grammy. Not Grandma, not Nonna, not Glammy, though I considered it. Grammy, like the award. I had spent years building something in the music industry, on that strip of Sunset Boulevard, in a business that is not kind to women. I wasn’t leaving that behind. Grammy felt like something I had earned.

It sounds like a second-place award. It isn’t. It is the golden ticket. The lottery that paid off in ways that changed everything.

The first one was magic in a blanket. I stared at his tiny perfect face and made myself a promise no one else could hear: This is the do-over and I am not about to fuck it up.

More came after him. Two from my daughter's first marriage—a marriage neither of them was old enough to hold together — but they loved these two. The first was a blond boy with little muscle arms and full lips who expanded my heart again in ways I didn’t think were possible. Then a second. We called him Yoda: bald, enormous blue eyes, and a wisdom about him that made no sense in an infant.

My heart, it turned out, had no limit. Then the granddaughter arrived, and I’m certain my heart no longer fits in my chest.

The granddaughter my daughter’s husband promised me came last, with big blue eyes and ringlets of curls. I see his mother in her, and I see my own mother, women who left this world before she got here but somehow still show up in her face. I see myself too. Social, not shy. Loves to dance. A wild imagination. Passionate about everything.

She’s three, and when I come to the door, she goes nuts. She hears my knock, and by the time it opens she’s already there, vibrating, making a squealing sound as she yells “Grammeeeeeee.” Pure joy that hasn’t learned to contain itself. She loves me with her whole body, as if my arrival is the best thing that has happened to her in all three years of her life. I get down on my knees, open my arms, and take in every bit of it.

There is nothing to fix here. That’s the whole secret, and it only took me forty-eight years to find it.

The magical one is twenty-two now, an honor student who just graduated college with a business degree. He freestyle raps, fearless and fresh, and I believe, with the total lack of objectivity I'm entitled to, that he's going to be famous. He's also creative and sharp beyond the mic, the kind of person who'll be successful at whatever he does. We talk on the phone for hours about his life, his plans, what he's thinking about. His insight on so many topics, everything from politics to journalism to technology, sometimes throws me. He’s so kind and I hold the phone and just think: how did I get to be someone this person wants to talk to?

The blond one is twenty-one, his hair brown now, and I have told him to his face that those lips belong on a model. He has yet to thank me for the career advice. He's smart, musically talented, and driven. He lives for playing live shows, and I've spent decades watching people walk onstage. I know what it looks like when someone's got it. He's got it. He has lunch with me and often brings his friends, mostly musicians. He introduces me like I belong there. I sit in the middle of his world feeling lucky to be included. He turned me on to Radiohead, one of the greatest bands to ever exist, which I would have known decades ago if my ears hadn’t been so clogged with eighties glam bands. He reminds me most of myself. Loyal to the end. Mess with his people and you’re dead to him. A mob mentality I recognize completely.

He is also the one who said it plainly, the way twenty-one-year-olds sometimes do. “Grandparents have it good,” he told me, “because there’s no blame there. The parents are the ones who get the blame.”

Lucky us.

The one we called Yoda is nineteen. They came out as queer and have been sharing themselves with me ever since, sending me links to unisex vintage and designer fashion I would never have found on my own. A curator of eclectic music. A gifted artist. An encyclopedia of vintage technology, with an ongoing Google Doc of things they wish to one day acquire that would make a collector weep. A foodie who will try anything, anywhere, and says yes every time I suggest getting together. The most careful person I know with other people's feelings, someone who never wants to hurt anyone. Wisdom rooted in compassion and empathy.

No history in the room. No eggshells underfoot. This is where all the love that had nowhere to land finally finds its way through.

I have spent more time than I care to admit walking on eggshells around the people I love most, afraid to be too much, too loud, too eager to fix everything in sight. Too much myself. It turns out I just hadn’t met the right audience yet.

Grandchildren, I have learned, are perfectly happy to let you be useful. Need an Uber at 3 a.m.? Call Grammy. Hairstylist who costs more than the electric bill? Grammy. Shoes, clothes, swimming lessons, driving lessons, guitar lessons, vacations? Grammy, Grammy, Grammy. A handbag filled with gifts? Grammy. I show up and I love every minute of it. For someone who was always trying to fix things nobody wanted fixed, being on the wanted list is a whole different feeling. Less toolbox, more cape.

David Bowie only promised us one day of being heroes. I want to be their hero every day. That is the whole ambition, the entire plan. And speaking of my heroes, Joni Mitchell knew it too: there’s no going back, only the circle game carrying us round and round. I used to think that was the sad part. Now I know it’s the whole point.

A child’s laugh cannot be saved for later. You spend it the moment it’s offered or it is gone. You don’t get to change the first time. That part is already written, but you get the next one. You get to show up completely, no baggage, just yourself standing at the door while a three-year-old loses her mind with happiness because you knocked.

That is the do-over. Not a chance to be young again, but a first chance to be free.

For every mother carrying a list of wrongs: it doesn’t go away. But one day, if you’re lucky, someone who looks like your child but isn’t will look up at your face and decide it’s a good face to look at. Grammy, like the award. I hope I’ve earned it.

My daughter doesn’t yet know what this feels like. I hope she gets years and years of it. I hope her grandchildren run at her with their whole bodies, and I hope she feels what I feel: pure joy, no guilt, no urge to make it better than it already is.

We are not going to get it perfect. None of the women in my family ever did. Some were gone before they got the chance to see how the story turned out. But the ones still here are still trying, still showing up in the ways we know how and learning the ways we don’t. That has to be enough, and on most days, it is.

With my grandchildren, I don’t walk on eggshells.

I dance on them.

The other night, a friend, well past the age we’re all supposed to quietly fade into invisibility, shared on one of our usual one-hour phone calls that she’s in a phone sex relationship. Not a desperate substitute or a punchline, but more like a genuine thrill that has her laughing more, wanting more, and feeling more alive.

After the initial shock wore off, something shifted in the conversation. I’d stumbled into a version of her life that no one ever shows, the one that exists beyond updates about aging parents, struggling kids, and whatever our doctors want us to worry about next. I wanted every single detail. She was more than happy to oblige.

And then I realized this wasn’t just a moment between the two of us. It was the exception to a rule we’ve accepted: that somewhere between menopause and whatever comes next, a switch flips. The heat goes out, the wanting disappears. We “dry up” so the world doesn’t have to deal with the reality of older women who still crave, still flirt, still ache for connection and pleasure.

Except we don’t.

What actually dries up is the performance and pretending. We’ve lost our tolerance for bad sex, lazy partners, and the exhausting need to be desirable on someone else’s terms. What’s left is something more interesting: women who know exactly what they want and aren’t shy about finding it, even when it looks nothing like it did at twenty-five. My friend isn’t an outlier. She’s just saying the part so many of us hesitate to say out loud.

We’re not dead yet.

The women I know are not fading. They’re radiant, but not in the way we were taught to define it at twenty. It's the kind that only shows up after you've stopped performing for an audience, the kind that’s impossible to manufacture and impossible to fake. We wear the clothes we like, keep our hair long, or cropped, or wild, and we sleep naked, in silk, or in old ripped up concert t-shirts that feel like an act of defiance.

Desire hasn’t left but it’s changed shape. It’s no longer just about a cute face or the quick hit of attention from someone who may or may not call. As we get older, we’re drawn to something more specific, like a conversation that actually goes somewhere, laughter that doesn’t feel rehearsed, the kind of intimacy that shows up in small and unexpected ways. A hot cup of coffee brought to us in bed. A full tank of gas because someone didn’t want us to be stranded. Dinner prepared, and yes, the cleanup too.

And before anyone misreads that as us hanging up our lingerie: we still want sex. Let's just say we've all been Meg Ryan’s character Sally Albright in that diner scene, faking it so convincingly that we got a standing ovation. We’re done ordering off that menu.

The other thing that nobody tells you about getting older is that you stop accepting what you once mistook for love. We know the difference now. We want to be loved, but not as a project or as something to be maintained. We want to be adored in the full complexity of who we are now and not a younger version of ourselves.

A gay male friend once said to me, coming back from the gym: “If I’m going to be old, I’m going to be hot.” I told him I was making that my motto and I meant it. The funny thing is, that was a decade ago. Age is relative. The motto is not.

After my second marriage ended, I made a list. Not the kind you make at twenty when you’re still negotiating with fantasy, but a real list of the things I was no longer willing to talk myself out of.

There were plenty of men to date. Men with money who thought that was enough, and men that flattered me so extravagantly it started to feel like a sales pitch. I went on a few dates and then went home to my gorgeous apartment in Santa Monica and opened a bottle of prosecco. I went through my list and crossed them out. Next.

I even considered dating a woman. I’d met her many years before and saw her occasionally, always in the company of others. She oozed passion in a way that didn’t ask for attention but was as natural as her wild blonde curls and tan skin that looked like she’d spent half her life in the sunshine. I’ve never kissed a girl, not in the Katy Perry sense, not in any sense for that matter, but I would have kissed her. Something about her made the idea feel like a possibility. In all my years of dating men, I had never met someone who carried that kind of passion and confidence so effortlessly.

I always knew what I wanted. She just made me think that maybe it was time to expand where I looked for it. But she was gay, and taken. What she clarified was that I wasn’t just looking for a man but instead looking for that quality of passion, that kind of aliveness. If I couldn’t find it, I wouldn’t be interested. Settling has consequences.

This is something I knew too well. So I waited, and along came a doctor. He was the list.

Must be romantic ✓

Must love cats ✓

Must love LA and NY ✓

Must love Italian food and culture ✓

Good in bed ✓

Must believe that mad, passionate love doesn’t only exist in movies ✓

As it turned out, he understood settling too. He’d stayed married for too long to someone who was, by his own description, the opposite of everything he wanted but who offered something that felt safe, predictable, and manageable. For a man like him, he told me, was a death sentence. He divorced, and then dated the wrong people, all versions of what he said he didn’t want but couldn’t break the pattern. He eventually wrote a list.

His list, after all those years and costly detours, contained exactly two words.

Sophia Loren ✓

I mean. Hello.

Before he came along, between the list and the imagined kiss and the forgettable dates, I lit candles in my own bedroom just because I wanted to. I poured a glass of wine for myself, ate mortadella and good cheese for dinner, and put on music to create an intimacy that didn’t require a partner. I never stopped believing in love. I just refused to abandon myself while waiting for it.

Women are no longer interested in fake romance or recycled excuses. We’ve been around long enough to know the difference between a man who desires us and a man who just needs a warm body next to him, who shows up dazzling and disappears into the couch.

What used to sound like a consolation prize turns out to be its own kind of revelation: we don't need a man. We are perfectly happy alone. Alone is better than dragging around dead weight we have no interest in carrying. We spent too many years being someone’s emotional support animal and we have checked that bag for the last time.

This is not meant to sound like a statement of bitterness, but more like a genuine exhale. The candles I lit in my own bedroom, the glass of wine poured for no one but me, the music that created an atmosphere just because I wanted one, that was living. Desiring yourself, your own company, your own pleasure, your own presence in a room you've made beautiful for the simple reason that you're in it is its own kind of romance. This might be the most honest one because nobody disappoints you, and nobody can love you out of the contentment that comes from finally choosing yourself.

And then there’s this: I still can’t believe I ever thought that being told I look good for my age was a compliment. I look good. Period. The “for my age” is not a bonus qualifier, it’s a leash. It serves as a little reminder to stay grateful and to stay in my lane. I have no intention of ever staying in any lane. I never learned to parallel park and I’m not starting now.

And if a man can’t do the job, let’s just say there are plenty of women who can, and will. Maybe that’s why so many of us are changing lanes these days. Once you realize you’ve been trying to parallel park in a space that was never big enough for you, driving in a whole new direction starts to look appealing.

We are in our prime, the kind of prime that doesn’t show up at twenty-five because at twenty-five you’re still apologizing for being yourself, whoever that is. This prime is built on the wreckage of every compromise we made and every time we smiled through something that deserved a hard no.

We didn’t dry up, we woke up, and the men who can handle that, the ones who find it thrilling instead of threatening, are having the time of their lives.

As for the others…who cares.

There is a moment, if you spend enough time with Brigette Lugo, when you stop listening to her words and just watch her. The way her hands move when she talks, like punctuation marks with a pulse. That gorgeous smile that gives no warning for the laugh that follows, a laugh so big and loud you can't help but join it. And those long dark signature curls when she turns her head.

Her parents named her after Brigitte Bardot, and people have been telling her she looks like Salma Hayek for most of her adult life. In her own humble eyes, she has never quite lived up to either. Everyone around her would strongly disagree.

What she will own, completely and without hesitation, is this: she is a lot.

It started in kindergarten. She remembers chasing a girl named Ashley around the playground. Ashley would later recall that Brigette was wearing a Barney shirt and kept asking, “Will you be my friend? Will you be my friend? until Ashley finally gave in. They stayed friends through high school and what Brigette remembers from those early years is not so much the friendship, but the feeling around it: the secondhand embarrassment she could see on other kids’ faces just from being near her.

“I’ve always been that way,” she says. “There’s not something I can pinpoint. I was just desperate to have someone there with me.”

The report cards said it all: Talks too much. Every year, without fail. It wasn’t malicious, she’ll tell you. She wasn’t pulling anyone’s hair. She was just being social. Her father eventually developed a signal for restaurants, a quiet gesture that meant you’re too loud. She would look at him with dagger eyes, thinking, How are you trying to control me when at home you have the loudest laugh, the loudest sneeze, and you think everything my mother says is hilarious. She laughs telling the story now. She learned, over time, to modulate in public, but with her people, she lets it go.

“They know that’s part of who I am,” she says. “We’re at a restaurant, we’re laughing, we’re having drinks, and I’m the loudest every time. They just think, ‘This is her.’”

She also shows up in every city she visits before the sun is fully up, hunting down the best menudo she can find. She has strong opinions about craft beer, loves The Clash, and is a die-hard fan of The Smiths, whom she discovered as a teenager. It was the melancholy, the emotion of the lyrics, that resonated in a way little else did at that age. She still loves the music, but Morrissey, she’ll tell you, is a piece of shit.

For the record, Brigette does not walk into rooms calculating her effect. She never has. She was the girl getting teased for her unibrow in elementary school, and she’ll turn up today in sweats with not a second thought about how she looks, which makes what happens next all the more bewildering to her.

Guy friends’ girlfriends don’t want Brigette around their boyfriends. She says it with a laugh that doesn’t quite cover the hurt underneath it. In her late teens and early twenties, learning this would break her heart, finding out through mutual friends that women who smiled at her face were talking about her behind her back. She lost quite a few male friends over this.

“It would get under my skin,” she says. “And now I just can’t care about it, because it’s who I am. I’m sorry that there are things going on for you personally that have nothing to do with me. Your insecurity isn’t mine to fix.”

The women in her life now whose husbands and partners genuinely love her like a sister, have one thing in common. Brigette identified it herself: “They’re secure in themselves. That’s all. That’s the whole difference.”

Security, she has found, is the price of admission. And for those who have it, what they get in return is something most people never find, someone who will go to the mat for them. She is fiercely loyal, and she has said it out loud in rooms full of people.

“I’m a ride or die. I don’t have a choice,” she says. “If you’re my person, I love you, I care about you, and that person who made you feel disrespected? They’re dead to me.”

The price of having Brigette is accepting all of her. Most people, she has found, want a discount.

To understand her, you have to understand where she comes from, two places that shaped her in ways she is still discovering.

Her father was born in Granada, Nicaragua, one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the Americas, its colonial architecture rising in ochres and blues along the shore of Lake Nicaragua. His mother, Brigette’s grandmother, brought the family to the United States during the political turmoil of the Civil War years. Her father went on to build his own production and promotion company from their garage, creating Spanish-language television shows for Salvadoran and Guatemalan communities. He is 6’1”, good-looking, strong, and deeply Nicaraguan.

Brigette’s mother is from Chiriquí, a province in western Panama known for its lush highland country, coffee plantations climbing toward picturesque mountains, and above them, the Barú volcano. She is a beautiful woman, and one look at her tells you where Brigette gets it. She’s been a caregiver for the elderly since Brigette was thirteen, and every one of her clients' families says the same thing: your mom's an angel.

Between these two people, Brigette was made, and eighteen months later, her brother Brian. The two have always been close, raised inside culture that never left the house. Their grandmother’s recipes. Their father’s sports idols, boxer Alexis Argüello and Pittsburgh Pirates baseball player Roberto Clemente, and his loud pride in everything Nicaraguan.

When Brigette finally went back to Panama three years ago, after twenty years away, she partied with her uncles like she’d never partied in her life.

“They know where to go,” she says. “We stay with them and we go to the countryside. It’s beautiful.”

She has started a notebook where her mother describes how her late grandmother made dishes like arroz Valenciana, a Nicaraguan hodgepodge of mustard, ketchup, peas, ham, and sausage over rice that no one has ever quite replicated.

“I’m really trying to not let that die,” she says. “I’m unapologetically Nicaraguan and Panamanian. I wear that culture on my sleeve. I don’t want it to die with me.”

That same urgency lives in the stories she tells. Her drive to find the people whose voices were never amplified didn’t come from a classroom. She felt the injustice of erasure before she had language for it, and when she found journalism, she understood immediately that this was the tool. This was how you pushed back.

By the time she arrived in the journalism program at Mt. San Antonio College, something in her was already sharpened. She walked in hungry, and quickly became editor-in-chief of the program’s award-winning magazine, Substance, and editor of the student news media sports section. But the work that mattered most to her didn’t exist yet, so she created it. Somos Gente LA, a Latinx student media platform, was built to tell the stories that weren’t being told, among them, a Latinx all-female surf club, and Ranflas y Recuerdos, a deep dive into the Zoot Suit Riots when American servicemen turned on the Mexican-American youth and minorities who called Los Angeles home. She also penned a column called Imma Rant Real Quick, her unfiltered take on issues affecting women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community.

She was never quiet about any of it.

At a journalism conference in Sacramento, when her team was struggling to find a story, she spotted a Hispanic man working on a riverboat and asked if she could talk to him. He told her to come back in half an hour. What he gave her, in a borrowed theater with no one else in the room, was a story about nearly being deported, a detention, a harrowing journey that mirrors everything happening in this country right now. From there she found a busboy from Honduras who’d been smuggled across by coyotes. He sat with her for twenty minutes, no tears, speaking calmly in Spanish about things that should have undone him.

“When you actually talk to people,” she says, “and you’re part of that culture, and you can communicate, and empathize, they trust you. And you learn stories that would otherwise never exist.”

She and her team called that piece, The Invisible People. It won several first place multimedia awards from local and national college media organizations.

“I always knew who I was fighting for,” she says. “That part was never the question.”

The question that took longer, the one that would cost her more than she ever expected to pay, was who was fighting for her.

Here is what people think they know about Brigette: that she is invincible. Too strong, too loud, too smart, too Latina to be fooled by anyone, broken by anyone. She is not the kind of woman something like this happens to. The truth is: It happened to her.

He hit her. More than once. More than she told most people.

She married him when she was twenty-three. He was an artist. They were bohemian, free-spirited, and in love, or what she thought love was supposed to look like at that age. She made excuses and did the mental gymnastics. She told herself it would get better, that this time she could talk him out of it, that if she changed something in herself, he wouldn’t do it again.

“There is so much that goes into why a person stays,” she says. “Things other than finances, or kids, or the Stockholm syndrome of knowing this person for years while he’s beating the shit out of you. There are so many reasons, and I wish people would understand this without it needing to be their daughter or their sister. How about just having empathy for all women?”

There was a night she came close to losing consciousness. She left. What followed was a particular kind of cruelty she hadn't anticipated — the silence of people who didn't know what to do with a woman like her inside a story like this, as if surviving abuse were a reward reserved for the quiet and the meek.

“Everybody holds you to this standard,” she says. “You’re this bad bitch, outspoken, you don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks, and all of a sudden you’re at the hands of this man and no one understands why. There is a shame that comes with it. Your self-confidence is already shaken, and then it’s like, how is this even possible?”

She called the domestic violence hotline from inside her marriage, more times than she can count, just to talk to someone. She shares those resources publicly whenever a story about abuse surfaces, because she remembers what it was like to need them and not know they existed.

“I will post those links every time a story like this comes up,” she says, “because if there’s just one person who clicks on it, one person who says, ‘Oh, this is why women stay,’ or ‘There’s something I can do to help someone I know’, then it’s worth it.”

She doesn’t use the word survivor as a descriptor when she’s first getting to know someone. Not because she’s ashamed, but because it reduces her to a single chapter.

“It’s not one of the first things I share at an intimate level,” she says. “I’m proud, but I don’t want it to be the headline of who I am.”

And yet, when she finally told that story of domestic violence, in her own words, it won every local and national journalism award it was eligible for. The women who reached out afterward were too many to count.

"If I can help one woman get through a situation like the one I found myself in, I've done something I'm proud of.

Trusting men doesn't come easy, and she'll tell you that plainly. The ones who approach her rarely make it easy either, and they do approach her. Often, they disappoint her, wanting the idea of her, the energy, the fire, without the full weight of who she actually is. She knows what she wants now in a way she couldn't at twenty-three: someone who pursues her without it tipping into obsession, someone stable, someone funny, not arrogant-funny but genuinely funny, what she calls Curb Your Enthusiasm funny. Someone who, when she says she's sick, sends soup.

“I haven’t mentioned roses,” she says. “I haven’t mentioned Valentine’s Day stuff. I want somebody who’s going to make me laugh and who will Uber Eats me soup because I told them I wasn’t feeling well. Little things like that.”

She watches her parents, married nearly forty years, still cackling at each other at 7 a.m. and knows exactly what she’s looking for.

“I used to think I needed to be less,” she says. “Now I think they need to be more.”

She wants children too. She has always gravitated toward kids, and they toward her. Her father beats around the bush about it when they talk, asking if she’s seeing anyone. She gives him the look. He wants what she wants, but most of all, after everything, for her to be happy. She wants that too.

"A partner who loves me, children, and doing work that matters," she says. "That's the whole dream."

If you want to find Brigette now, you can find her ringside.

At 37, she found herself working as a multimedia journalist for Xicana Boxing, connected by Andres Soto, a college media colleague turned sports journalist whose credits include ESPN, the LA Times, and USA Today, and who never forgot how talented Brigette is. When he crossed paths with the site’s creator, he thought of Brigette immediately. A DM, a couple of beers at Highland Park Brewery, and a piece Brigette wrote holding boxer Tank Davis accountable for domestic violence, led to the publication’s creator asking to publish her story.

One thing led to another and what followed was a working partnership with Xicana Boxing where she assisted with running their social, covering fights in real time, writing for the zine, and interviewing boxers and wrestlers with the same fearless curiosity she once brought to Sacramento.

Her favorite part of the job, she said without hesitation:

“Interviewing fighters in Spanish. We can make reels where I ask, ‘What’s your favorite salsa?’ and these guys just light up. There are people in media circles who speak no Spanish, and we’re churning out content that’s bilingual, that’s Spanglish, that’s actually for the community. There’s nothing like speaking to a fighter in their native tongue. They trust you.”

She trained in boxing herself for two years with a high school teacher turned mentor who believed in her enough to train her without charge. She never sparred, but once or twice, may have seen her ex-husband’s face on the punching bag, which she says with a small, hard smile.

She watches the fighters she covers take punches that would end most people, climb off the canvas, and keep going. She sees herself in that. Not in the hitting, but in the getting up, in the part where you have no reason to keep going and you go anyway.

“I never pictured being here, period, as in, being alive,” she says. “What I went through, I saw every day that I might not survive. I look at these fights and it’s hard not to see a parallel. I used to take hits because I saw myself as weak, and I was stuck.”

And now she’s ringside, credentialed, microphone in hand, no longer stuck. Her latest venture is covering fights for Boxing Scene.

While she continues to shine as a multimedia journalist, her personal relationship goals are simple.

“I want someone who actually puts in the work to get to know me, and who likes me as I am,” she says. “That sounds so basic, but that’s what I want.”

She pauses, then laughs.

“I know I’m too much. I’ve always been too much. And I’m done apologizing for it.”

She throws her head back, wild curls flying, and that laugh comes out, the loud one, the real one. You can’t fake that. You either have it or you don’t.

She has it.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. You can also chat online at thehotline.org.

I was baptized into the Catholic Church before I had any say in the matter, which is how the Church prefers it. A few years later I made my First Communion in white gloves and a dress that made me look like a small bride, receiving the body of Christ for the first time with the solemn expression of a child who had been told many times that this was not a snack.

Then came Confirmation, the sacrament where you choose your own saint’s name and the Church considers you a full adult in the faith, which is a lot of responsibility to hand to a twelve-year-old. I chose Teresa because it sounded good with Toni.

Every Sunday we went to Mass. Someone had to pray for my father’s sins. That job fell on our mother, my sister, and me.

I attended Catholic schools from first grade on, where the nuns taught me that God was watching, that suffering was holy, and that I should say this prayer every single night before bed: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I was six.

IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE.

I haven’t slept well since.

I pray often now, in the car, in the shower, and walking past the saints on my shelf. I carry Holy Water in my bag and sprinkle it on my family without their knowledge. I say the Hail Mary like a mantra in the dark when I can’t sleep, which is most nights.

But I’m not religious. I guess I’m just covering my ass, in case.

I no longer go to Mass and I don’t confess my sins to a priest, which would take considerably longer than it used to. I show up for the big ones like Ash Wednesday, when I let a priest drag his thumb across my forehead and then walk around all day with a grey smudge between my eyes like a woman who has reconsidered her life choices. And Palm Sunday, because I bring the palms home and tuck them into the hands of the saints and pass them to the sinners in my family who chose not to sit through the longest Mass of the year. Easter and Christmas have fallen through the cracks, which is strange considering how important these two holidays are to Catholics. I think the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus stepped in and took over for Jesus.

My best friend, also Italian, and I once made a solemn pact to attend Sunday Mass every week and become, finally, the good Catholics our parents always believed we were. The truth is we had heard there was a thriving Catholic singles group at an upscale church that was nowhere near our neighborhood but had a solid congregation of eligible men and a restaurant that served a boozy brunch directly across the street. She was single and looking. I was dating my now-husband, who at the time came with enough baggage to require its own storage unit, so I figured I could do double duty: support my best friend in her search for love and pray for his soul at the same time. Two intentions, one Mass. I’m all about efficiency.

Mass let out at 11:30, brunch started at noon, and somewhere between the Holy Spirit and the hollandaise, Mimassa Sunday was born: Mass followed immediately by mimosas, a tradition we kept up considerably longer than the actual religion. What ended it for good was an old priest who used his homily to explain that gay marriage was a sin. This is the fastest way to turn two Italian liberal women into former Catholics who are now day-drinking without the Mass part.

Not attending Mass on Sundays doesn’t mean I don’t have my rituals.

Every time I board a plane, I carry a plastic bag filled with Holy Water and small bottles of vodka, and just before takeoff I bless the pilot and the flight attendants (without their knowledge), myself, and my husband.

I have a personal relationship with Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, which makes him perhaps the most universally beloved and most frequently pestered saint. Lose your keys? Saint Anthony. Lose your wallet? Saint Anthony. And then there’s Saint Joseph, who you call on when you need to sell a house. You bury a small statue of Saint Joseph in the yard, upside down, near the For Sale sign. I’ve done this and the house sold. But when I'm really desperate, I call on the lesser-known saints, because the popular ones, like Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes, are swamped.

My home office has a shelf with fifty-three saints and several wooden and glass crosses. When I walk past my saints, I touch the top of each one’s head. I don’t know exactly when this started. I also have at least a dozen sets of rosary beads. This extensive devotion collection has come from antique stores, estate sales, dead relatives, and the occasional gift from my daughter, who has become an expert at finding vintage Italian saints. Some are beautiful and some are a little terrifying, like the Virgin Mary that lights up or the blown-out egg with the Virgin Mother inside.

There is also a gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary wearing a large gold crown that I bought from an antique store in New Orleans. I’m convinced she has secret powers. Weird things have happened around that statue. I won’t go into it because it gives me nightmares, but let’s just say that my dead mother appeared in my French Quarter hotel room right after I bought her. I swear it wasn’t a dream. Heading home, I never understood the stares I got going through airport security. Doesn’t everyone fly with a three-foot saint?

When my Aunt Mena died, I carried two gigantic statues of Christ and Mary on a train from Connecticut to New York, then onto a plane back to California, those saints riding with me like ceramic bodyguards. I’ve never felt so safe flying. My birthday and Christmas lists all have the same thing, right after the Fendi baguette and the apartment in New York: Vintage saints from Italy.

It’s not unusual for my daughter to call me from a thrift store or an estate sale.

“Hey Mom, there’s two church pews here and a big painting of the Virgin Mary. You interested?”

I’m always interested.

There are also the broken ones. A ceramic cross with a chip along one arm. A saint missing his hand at the wrist, Saint Francis, I think, though at this point he has enough company that he doesn’t seem lonely. A small Madonna whose base cracked through in a move. Broken sacred things are still sacred. Maybe more so. They carry the evidence of a life lived around them, maybe a fall from a shelf, a move across the country, or the chaos of a family that didn’t always handle things gently. I keep them alongside the intact ones, or in my herb garden next to my ceramic Buddha.

It’s not just the saints; it’s all of it. The old churches and dark pews worn smooth by a hundred years of wool coats and nervous hands. I can’t visit a city without visiting an old church. The lasting smell of incense smoke trailing from a thurible swung on its chain, filling the vaulted air like a secret the walls have been keeping for centuries. The hallowed quiet of a space where people have been bringing their worst fears and desperate requests for generations, pressing them into the kneelers. The candles I light, usually asking for the safety of my family, or safety on the flight home.

I don’t know exactly what I believe about God, but I believe completely in the smell of incense and the irrational comfort it delivers, something that tells me what I need to hear: everything is fine, no one you love will die, and there is probably pasta afterward.

My office wall holds the writers and women I pray to in the secular sense — quotes from my favorite writers Nora Ephron and John Patrick Shanley, and a gigantic framed photo of Joni Mitchell given to me by my sister that hangs above my white faux leather sofa. Joni watches over everything. She is my personal saint. Saint Joni.

My husband’s friends walk into my office and a particular look crosses their faces. I’ve decided it means they think his wife is one saint away from an intervention.

My white desk sits behind the shelf of saints on a large white faux fur rug. Seven old paintings of saints are propped against another wall, all collected from estate sales, each one carrying the weight of having hung in someone else’s house of grief. One is signed by several men in Italian. I’m convinced they may have been priests, or saints themselves. There is also a child’s rocking chair from Italy that I am convinced rocks on its own.

Yes, I know how it sounds, and no, I’m not changing anything.

At night, I calm myself by saying a full rosary, no beads required. After a lifetime of Masses and funerals, the words come up on their own, the way an old song does. Do I think anyone is listening? Honestly, I’m not sure. But as Joni Mitchell sings, I sent up my prayer, wondering who was there to hear.

The fear of death is not something I’ve outrun. It lives in me the way the smell of incense lives in old churches, absorbed into the walls over decades. My saints are not decoration but company. They are the comfort of objects that have been touched by loss and prayer and time, that have stood on someone’s dresser while someone prayed beneath them. They have passed through the hands of people who are gone now. My daughter finds them for me. My family has given them to me. Some came from people who died, which means they carry a residue of devotion, the trace of hands that touched them before mine. Even the broken ones.

My Nonnie put quarters under hers and prayed in Italian. I touch their heads and pray in English. I don’t know if it works, but I believe someone is listening. I’ve had too many prayers answered not to.

My name is Toni Ann Teresa, and I’m not crazy.

I’m Italian.

My mother tap-danced through chemotherapy.

I’ve lived with this since my mother died and it still makes me feel like a spiritual underachiever. While she was losing her hair and her strength and eventually, heartbreakingly, her life, she was dancing. Literally. Tap shoes. Rhythm. Jazz hands.

Her philosophy, when faced with any of life’s sucker punches, was this: Let’s face the music and dance.

Mine, if I’m being brutally honest, is: Let’s Google symptoms at 2 a.m. until we’ve diagnosed ourselves with three rare cancers and one that you later learn only affects cows. I guess the term bovine should have given me a clue that I was actually on a farm veterinary site.

This afternoon I have an MRI. There’s a mass in my uterus, found on an ultrasound, a finding that arrived like a small bomb that detonated in my head. My husband, who happens to be a doctor, has told me it’s benign. He doesn’t just say this, he guarantees it with the unshakeable confidence of a man who has been practicing medicine for five decades, teaching medical students, and apparently developing some kind of diagnostic superpower along the way.

“Have I ever been wrong?” he asks.

The answer is no, he hasn’t. And yet, I’m unconvinced. The radiologist said he doesn’t think it’s something to worry about, “probably a fibroid.” My gynecologist has offered the same reassurance, adding the “probably” which cuts the reassurance in half.

I have chosen to believe none of them and have gone straight to the dark place anyway.

I’ve already lost my hair. I’ve already scheduled the hysterectomy and the chemotherapy. I’ve cancelled my upcoming trip to New York. In the span of thirty-six hours, I have lived out an entire alternate timeline in which I am very, very sick.

This is not my first rodeo with a scary diagnosis. Six years ago, heart disease arrived without knocking. No warning, just a result on a heart scan and a doctor’s very serious face. I worked hard and changed everything. I learned I was capable of more than I thought. But it hasn’t stopped me from checking my pulse every time my heart feels like it’s skipping beats, and right now, it’s jump roping from fear.

But cancer. That word doesn’t live in the same zip code as the others. Cancer is where my imagination goes feral. It doesn’t matter that heart disease is the number one killer of women. At least with heart disease, if you have a fatal heart attack, you clutch your chest and drop dead. Cancer, on the other hand, can be slow and hard to watch. It has a way of taking not just the life but sometimes the dignity of someone you love. I’ve watched this firsthand.

I’ve had the usual scares. The abnormal pap smears, the breast biopsy that turned out to be nothing, the kind of medical near-misses that age you slightly and make you hold your coffee cup a little tighter the next morning. But there’s something about the word mass that short-circuits the rational brain entirely. It doesn’t matter that the odds are in my favor. I’m not thinking about odds. I’m thinking about wigs.

More than once, in moments of diagnostic panic, I have asked my hair stylist Aliza whether she could make me a wig that looks just like my own blonde hair. The conversation started years ago when I came in to find her styling a beautiful long wig for an Orthodox Jewish woman, a tradition of covering one's hair with a wig rather than a scarf. I already knew I was not a scarf person.

Her response, every time, is delivered with the patience of a saint and the confidence of a really great hair stylist.

“You are the only client who has ever asked me this question to prep for cancer that you don’t have,” she says. “And of course I can.”

I choose to take this as a compliment. I am unique and prepared. I am also unhinged.

After the result of the ultrasound and scheduling the MRI, I did what any self-respecting catastrophist does: I made the calls.

First, to my sister. I asked her the question I always ask: “What if it’s cancer?”

Her response, the same every time I ask: “That would really suck.”

And then, because she is the good witch in this family coven, she paused and told me she felt nothing weird. No bad energy. No alarm bells. This comes from a woman whose instincts I trust. She’s the one who has always felt the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention when something is wrong. Italian mob radar.

Next, my daughter, who Googles with the precision of a research scientist and delivers the probably-nothings like a gift. She is calm where I am chaos. She somehow inherited my worry gene and yet deploys it backward. “Mom, I’m sure it’s benign,” she tells me as she’s obviously googling. “From the results, it seems like just a small benign finding like a fibroid or polyp.”

Then my daughter-in-law, who I’m convinced has psychic powers. I hesitate before I call her because she has predicted things that came true. She doesn’t deal in empty reassurance; she deals in something more certain: “I know you’re okay.” I don’t question it. I just accept her prediction like the spiritually desperate person I am in these moments.

Finally, my best friend since we were sixteen, the woman who has seen every version of me. She doesn’t offer me comfort exactly. She offers me something better: a badass boss. She becomes someone I cannot argue with.

When I tell her what I’ll do if the results are cancer, that I’ll crawl in a corner or do a Thelma and Louise, she says, “So, you’re just going to throw in the towel? Not happening. Buck up buttercup.”

I tell her I want to be okay. I want to skip the whole chapter entirely and go straight to the part where someone says those two words and I can finally exhale. An hour passes and she’s still on the phone giving me the stern, but motivating pep talk. She has talked me off many ledges and she does it with such sheer force of will that I don’t even realize I’ve been ledge-adjacent until I’m already back on solid ground.

The calls help but there are only two words that will save me: It’s benign. Those are the only words that will allow me to dance and pop the champagne bottle.

Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that what I’m about to write is going to make me sound like Mother Teresa. My husband would agree with half of that. The other half, he says, is Sonny Corleone. So before you judge a woman who may or may not be dying, just know you’re dealing with both of them at once.

I’ve often wondered if anyone really understands why I’m so afraid of dying.

My Brazilian cousin, a woman of rare emotional intelligence and the one I credit for my ritual of praying naked with my hands crossed over my breasts in the shower, once said something I’ve carried in the pocket of my chest ever since.

We were on her New York apartment veranda talking about death. Not morbidly, just the way you do when you’ve both watched people you love leave too soon. She said she wasn’t afraid of dying. She was afraid of not being here to take care of her family.

My first thought was: This may be the only person who really gets me.

I think my entire purpose on this earth is to take care of everyone else in it. I’m the one who fixes things, handles things, solves things. And when I go to the dark place, the cancer place, the what-if place, my fear isn’t really about dying, it’s about leaving. Who will fix everything? What happens to all of them if I’m not here?

I want to be here when my grandchildren figure out who they are. I want to be the person they call when things go sideways. I want to rescue them if they need it.

And I want time, more of it. Time spent with my children and my family and friends, more vacations, parties, celebrations. My mother wanted all of those things too. More life, more dancing, more time. She only met four of her five grandchildren, and not one of her four great grandchildren. What a loss, for her and for them.

Life isn’t fair.

And since I cannot be kind to myself for more than thirty consecutive seconds, I start playing the blame game. I call it the if onlys.

If only I had taken those heart-related blood results more seriously. If only I’d seen a gynecologist sooner. If only I took better care of myself instead of everyone else. I am apparently excellent at taking care of other people and criminally negligent when it comes to myself, a fact I’ve been told by enough people that I’ve had to accept it as a character trait rather than an oversight.

I’m thinking of making the if onlys into a board game for neurotic people like myself. The idea of rolling the dice makes perfect sense. Every day that we wake up is a roll of the dice, hoping we don’t land on cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or something worse.

And then, right on cue, I think of my mother.

My mother would be upset with me right now, lovingly, warmly upset. She would tell me to stop worrying until I had reason to. She would tell me to stop jumping to the worst conclusions. Here’s another if only: If only I could be like my mother.

Every morning, she drank her coffee like it was a religious experience. “Ahhhh,” she’d say, closing her eyes like someone who had just found nirvana in a coffee cup.

“Did you do something different with the coffee today?”

“No, Mom. Same coffee.”

“Well, it’s the best cup I’ve ever had.”

Every evening, she ran outside to watch the sunset. Every single one was the most beautiful she’d ever seen. I told her once that I’d never watched a sunset without wondering if it was my last. She gave me the look, followed by the Ted Talk.

“Don’t ruin your present life worrying about a future you can’t control. You could get hit by a bus.”

In a few hours I will be lying in an MRI machine, shaking, bargaining with every saint and dead relative I can name, and hoping the bus doesn’t arrive disguised as cancer.

It’s only 10 a.m. and I’m wondering if it’s too early for champagne.

My mother’s voice arrives immediately: It’s five o’clock somewhere.

My own voice arrives half a second later: No champagne until you have a reason to celebrate.

So I’m here, writing this instead. Trembling. Trying to be present, occasionally stopping to once again check how many times the word cancer appears when you Google “uterine mass.” The answer, for those wondering, is: too many times.

Here’s the thing I can’t shake in the middle of all this panic: My mother lived in the present. She died having loved her life and everyone in it, fully and completely, even the parts that were terrifying.

I am not my mother. I will never be my mother. I have accepted this the way you accept a lot of things about yourself after a certain age. She faced the music and danced. I face the music and immediately check if our will and trust are current.

So until I get the results of the MRI, I’ll do what I always do: prepare for the worst, keep one eye on the door for the bus I’m convinced is coming, and hold off on the champagne until I have an actual reason to open it.

And if the news is good?

Pop the cork, turn on the music, and dance.

Update:

When the MRI was completed, I got dressed. My husband was already speaking to the radiologist, and then he mutters the two most beautiful words in the English language:

It’s benign.

No mass. Just a cyst.

I stood there and ugly cried in the parking lot, which is the other thing I do besides worry. Then we went to dinner. I ordered a bottle of prosecco and a board piled high with salami and mortadella. What the hell, I’m not dying.

What a relief. I am so happy. And then, almost immediately, I remembered that I'm still mortal. But for now I'm not dying of this. My mother was right. Skip the cancer panic and get hit by a bus like a normal person.