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
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.
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?)
Relativism is not a helpful mode for grieving. By nature it has no fixed position, which is problematic when someone’s already adrift because one of the central fixed points of their life – a loved one -- is gone. Bare relativism isn’t that helpful generally: how many idiotic conversations have been started in college classrooms …
Continue reading Relatively speaking about grief (and other mistakes I’ve made).
Afterword 