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 …
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
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, …
https://youtu.be/dgxI3PT9IN8 Neil Young famously wrote that it’s hard to make arrangements with yourself. I‘ve always found this to be true. Of all the things I loved about being in a long term committed relationship, the dialectic was maybe my favorite. You are always bouncing things off one-another, and even when you don’t do so overtly, …
When Nina and I were married (which, I guess in some metaphysical sense we still are? But death legally terminates marriage, so I feel like I ought to use the past tense? Widowhood is weird?), I used to like to buy her anniversary gifts based on the "traditional" list of materials that runs from Paper …
Participating in The Atlantic's People v. Cancer got me thinking about mortality and survival and the cancer narrative that includes them both.
Last night the boys had Tae Kwon Do testing. They’re now the proud owners of a green belt with a blue stripe. Although their master during the belt ceremony reminded all the kids not to focus on the belt but on the discipline and hard work of learning their techniques, let’s be serious, the very …
Continue reading Tae Kwon Do or Tae Kwon Don’t, either way you’ll regret it.
Three dudes, three radically different perspectives on most things, let alone ultimate questions. In rereading my post from yesterday on recovering from surgery, I was struck by the fact that, even in taking myself down a peg for my approach to illness and recovery – imagining what Nina would have made of it all -- I …
This week was weird, even for me. On Monday I had knee surgery. It is the kind of knee surgery that’s so routine that the surgeon feels pretty blasé about telling you he does 15-20 of them a day. But there is no routine surgery when you’re the patient, and in my case, there is …
Continue reading Stool softeners, Zofran, and other remembrances of loves past
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,who neither listen nor speak;Who do not drink their tea, though they always saidTea was such a comfort.From Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies, by Edna St. Vincent MillayLoneliness isn’t actually a disease. I checked the DSM-V. But it’s got …
Continue reading Only the lonely (need to read this post, and maybe not even them?)
Afterword 