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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …