The story behind the piece
After my mother died, I inherited a shoebox of smooth river stones — one for every holiday we’d ever taken. For a year I couldn’t write about them without crying onto the keyboard. Then, one quiet February morning, the first true sentence arrived, and the essay poured out in a single sitting.
“Still Water” follows those stones from riverbank to mantelpiece, braiding childhood memory with the strange logistics of loss: the paperwork, the casseroles, the sudden laughter. At 2,400 words it is my most-read essay — shared thousands of times by readers who saw their own shoebox in mine.
How it was shaped
The challenge was restraint: grief essays curdle fast into sentiment. I cut three fully written drafts, keeping only scenes with a physical anchor — the stones, a chipped mug, my mother’s gardening gloves. What survived was leaner, truer, and far more moving than anything I’d overwritten.
“We keep what we can carry. The rest, the river keeps for us.”
—From “Still Water”
