My friend Alan Paskow is in his final days. Although not in a coma, he appears in perpetual sleep, and each day his breathing is more labored. Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death Bed” captures some of the experience of waiting and watching.
Tag Archives: cancer
Responding to Intruder Death
As we do every week, Julia and I visited our friends Alan and Jackie this past Sunday evening, Julia to administer Reiki massage and I to talk. Alan was tired from his chemotherapy treatments and in pain from a cracked rib (he doesn’t know how that happened). Nevertheless we talked about literature, including Sir Gawain […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged death and dying, Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed
Becoming the Hero of Our Own Life
David Copperfield (1935) “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” writes narrator David Copperfield at the beginning of the great Charles Dickens novel. But why the uncertainty? Can’t we just decide to be the hero of […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Beowulf, Catcher in the Rye, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, death and dying, In Memoriam, J. D. Salinger, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot | Comments closed
A Battle with Cancer: The Epic Version
From time to time I have written about my friend Alan, who has been assaulted by a series of cancerous tumors that the doctors keep on removing, either through surgery or through radiation/cyberknifing. He has had tumors removed from his eyelid, his neck, both lungs (six in all from the lungs) and now, most recently, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alan Paskow, death and dying, Homer, Odyssey | Comments closed
Befriending, Not Fighting, Grendel’s Mother
I am still vibrating from the powerful student essays I received last week. I talked about one yesterday and will share another today. This is one from a student whose mother is dying of brain cancer. Erica Rutkai (she is letting me use her name) decided to move from California to the east coast when […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Beowulf, death and dying, Erica Rutkai, Grendel's mother, Hero | Comments closed
Satirizing Doctors, the Best Medicine
Doctors debate while patient dies in Hogarth’s “Harlot’s Progress,” plate V I’ve talked several times about my friend Alan, who has been battling cancer for a while now. At present he is still alive, still working out at the gym, and still in the dark about what kind of cancer he has. He longs for […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged death and dying, Doctors, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones | Comments closed
The Kafkaesque World of Cancer
Tony Perkins in Welles’ The Trial I ran into my friend Alan in the gym on Monday. As I have reported in a number of past posts, Alan has been battling tumors in both lungs that continue to baffle doctors. At least one doctor predicted that he would be dead a […]
Arguing over Life, Death, and a Semicolon
John Donne Cancer has gone from being a word to being a reality for me as two close friends have been struck. Alan Paskow, whose progress I’ve been reporting on, had an operation before Christmas that removed three tumors from his right lung (one the size of a grapefruit). And Beth Reynolds had a tumor […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Death Be Not Proud", death and dying, John Donne, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed
And a woman said, “Tell us of Pain”
Here’s a poem that deals directly with pain, from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. I don’t entirely understand it but I’m intrigued by some of its claims: “And a woman spoke, saying, “Tell us of Pain.” And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Gospel of Matthew, Jesus, Kahlil Gibran, Pain, Prophet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tom Robbins | Comments closed
