Memorials are a mixed blessing, obviously - the object of the dedication is always missing. The memorial only exists because we feel bereft, we need to fill a void. But memorializing is also a way of leveraging grief to create new things in the space bereavement leaves behind, which is why I’m really excited …
Funny How Time Slips Away
I haven't written here in a while. I've been busy. Work ramped up, I have two kids, and, because I'm a masochist, we also just adopted a third shelter dog. But the truth is: I'm always busy. For a while I still felt compelled to write, but lately that just hasn't been true. I don't …
Birthdays, Death Days, and Heavy Metal Guitar
Sunday was my 43d birthday, which you may have missed on your calendar because it tends to be obscured by other, more lustrous anniversaries: Mozart's Birthday, the 118th Anniversary of plumbing innovator Thomas Crapper's death, and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. So, despite my obvious personal luminosity, there's a lot of 1/27 competition. My birthday is also …
Continue reading Birthdays, Death Days, and Heavy Metal Guitar
Disorientation Begins at Home
Did you ever travel somewhere and, when you wake up in the morning, it takes some time before you realize where you are? I don’t mean you feel a little fuzzy; an actual, disconcerting, sense of confusion or disorientation — like you really can’t orient as to time and place. A breakdown in one of …
Grief is like an stationary bike, and other obvious metaphors I’ve refused to self-edit.
Between recent knee surgery and the usual holiday/winter sloth, I fell off the workout wagon a little. But in the two weeks before a recent West Coast trip, I exercised almost daily. Not only that, I made ample use of my stationary bike – an investment I feared might collect more real cobwebs than virtual …
10 Steps for a Happy NYE
Nina and I tried to celebrate New Year's Eve. We really didn't love the holiday, but we made an effort. There was the year we made a reservation with friends at a fancy new place downtown with a big group of friends and at least three of us went home before the end of dinner …
The Introvert’s Dilemma (or Nothing Fails Like Prayer Beads)
I like people. Actually being around them can be nice, too, though preferably only one at a time. Maybe a small group if I’m feeling particularly centered. Anything more is likely to result in social anxiety and a night long marathon session of what Nina used to call the Recrimination Circus. It’s the mental place …
Continue reading The Introvert’s Dilemma (or Nothing Fails Like Prayer Beads)
A List of Good Books about Death, Grief, Loss, and Related Issues
It's almost Christmas, so many of you are probably wondering: "what gift can I buy that will devastate my loved ones to the point of tears while simultaneously affirming their basic humanity?" Right? Well, look no further: I’m building a little bibliography / reading list on grief, loss, mortality, terminal illness, and the like. It's …
Continue reading A List of Good Books about Death, Grief, Loss, and Related Issues
The Abyss
Sometimes when I’m trying to get my bearings it helps to borrow a specific structure or image. There’s the Stages of Grief, bequeathed on us for better or ill by Kubler-Ross, by which we can gauge our progress and feel badly about our failure to achieve proper staging; or if you’re more visual than schematic, …
Prologue to Afterword
I’ve been slower to post here lately. I thought it was just a symptom of life's relentless pace. The more I think on it, though, it seems the nature of the blog has shifted, or maybe I have. Initially, the writing was primarily an outlet for me, a coping and processing mechanism, and only secondarily …
Afterword 