Quotes from Tiffany Midge

The Lakota unburdened themselves of hair, of fingers, cut into their flesh to temporarily escape the grief of a loved one's death. I saw this on A Man Called Horse and in Dances with Wolves. But as far as I knew, no one in my immediate family had ever done this. My mother was worth far more than a hank of hair. She was worth my spine. My eyes. My womb.

The last time I ever saw Jeff alive, he gave me a gift - an hourglass. And it took over two decades later for the symbolism to finally dawn on me: an hourglass, gifted from a young man with one foot planted in the next world. His time was running out. Even the hourglass he gifted me appeared to have been stolen - I imagine from the desktop of one of the school classrooms he was hired to clean. Not borrowed time but stolen.