Anna Spargo-Ryan

“To speak of ‘trying again’ while her ghost was still in the room was an insult to both the child gone before and the child that might come after. The child before might be merely a precursor, a practice run, a whole person deemed sufficiently remembered and loved; while the child after might be a bandaid child, a second child, a replacement child. Without time taken to wait – not until the first child was forgotten but until the hideous burning fire of grief had dulled – neither child could be fully a person, but just a function of the other.”
― Anna Spargo-Ryan, The Paper House

“I hate Rosebud.’ She laughed. ‘My mother live there.’
‘Your mother?’ Sylvia had the drooped look of a Basset Hound. Eighty, at least.
‘You do not look at me like that. My mother one hundred and three years old and she still ring me to make sure I eat vegetables. I say to her, Mama, I will be dead in the ground just so you stop bugging me.”
― Anna Spargo-Ryan, The Paper House