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My father's death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

I had lived a charmed life, and then I lost a beautiful woman I loved with all my heart.

The moment I first heard love I gave up my soul, my heart, and my eyes.

To have gone through so much work to heal myself and have my mother not acknowledge in any way that she was sorry for what had happened to me, broke my heart.

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her.

I went through my whole life wanting to feel I belonged. I was very, very lonely, so I would marry people that I wasn't really in love with, and who weren't right for me, because I hoped they would be.

I cried like a baby. When no one could see me or hear me. Not because I feared what cancer would do, but because I didn't want the disease. I wanted my life to be normal, which it could no longer be.