Film Friday – 2010 in Review One of my favorite holiday films is the comic melodrama Family Stone (2008), the story of a family’s Christmas reunion. Despite their determination to put on a happy front, the family must face up to a number of underlying tensions. Foremost among these is the mother’s terminal cancer, which […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
How to Write a “True” Essay about Lit
When I wasn’t teaching class yesterday, I was continuing my marathon essay-grading session. I took a break to write today’s post, however, and used a well-known poem by Langston Hughes to reflect on what I was asking my students to do. In “Theme for English B,” the only black student in a college composition course […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Theme for English B", Beowulf, Langston Hughes, Race, teaching | Comments closed
Thy Eternal Summer Shall Not Fade–True?
Sunday evenings are for visiting our friends Alan and Jackie. I feel blessed that Alan is sharing his dying with us and that I get to have with him the final conversations I did not have with Justin, my son who drowned. We don’t talk that much about death. Mostly we talk, as we always […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mermaid Tavern", John Keats, Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare | Comments closed
Looking to Poetry for Afterlife Evidence
Spiritual Sunday It has finally sunk in with me that my friend Alan will not recover from his cancer, and I find myself wrestling once again with the questions that arose after my son drowned. The biggest question, of course, is whether death is the end. Every Sunday in my Episcopal Church I claim that […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Up-Hill", Christina Rossetti, death, George Herbert, Religion | Comments closed
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 cancer, Edgar Allan Poe, Masque of the Red Death, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed
Death Wears a Parka–or Is It an Anorak?
Today’s post is coming to you through the lens of two illnesses. Mine is the milder one: yesterdat I twisted the wrong way in the bathroom and suddenly found myself on the floor undergoing terrible back spasms. They got worse as the day progressed and I wrote today’s post standing up, my laptop on my […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Don DeLillo, fantasy, Midnight in Dostoevsky | Comments closed
Which Is Deeper, Love or Self?
I haven’t talked in a while about my friend Alan, who has experienced cancerous tumors in his neck, eyelid, lungs and brain. In each case they were either removed or radiated, allowing us to go on hoping that all would be well. Alan, after all, has already lived a year and a half longer than […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged D. H. Lawrence, John Knowles, Separate Peace | Comments closed
Big Sis, Baby Bro
The relationship between a big sister and her baby brother is special. In fact, it’s archetypal. It doesn’t matter if she is in her 80’s and he is in his 70’s. Somehow he is still “little bro,” and when she can’t protect him the universe seems to have gone horribly wrong. These thoughts came to […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Madeleine L'Engle, Sisters, Snow Queen, Wrinkle in Time | Comments closed
Blaming Loved Ones in the Face of Death
Edvard Munch, The Sick Child Imagine the following situation. A couple has been married for decades but now he has contracted a terminal illness and is dying. His wife has always prided herself on being there for him when he needed her, but now she feels helpless. Meanwhile he is scared and angry and is […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "man and wife", Alfred Lord Tennyson, death of a child, In Memoriam, Lucille Clifton, Marriage | Comments closed
