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 […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Death Wears a Parka–or Is It an Anorak?
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
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, cancer, Catcher in the Rye, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, In Memoriam, J. D. Salinger, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot | Comments closed
A Spiritual Interpretation of Waterfalls
Spiritual Sunday I still haven’t gotten over the waterfalls at Yosemite—does one ever?—and so am sharing a spiritual interpretation of a waterfall by the 17th century mystical Anglican poet Henry Vaughan. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I have mixed feelings about Vaughan (especially by how he sees the natural world cordoned off from […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Waterfall", Henry Vaughan, Intimations of Immortality, Religion, William Wordsworth | Comments closed
Epic vs. Ironic Heroes
On Monday I described my friend Alan as an Odysseus figure for the way he has coming back, time after time, in his battle with his cancer. He appreciated the article but was taken aback by the comparison and asked why I hadn’t compared him instead with someone like Holden Caulfield. He said he didn’t […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Anatomy of Criticism, Catcher in the Rye, Heroism, Homer, J. D. Salinger, Northrup Frye, Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | 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, […]
Mending Walls Can Save Lives
Robert Frost’s poems (as indicated by “Mending Wall,” which I wrote on yesterday) have the wonderful ability to move from the very specific to the universal. One begins with a small incident (two neighbors fixing a stone wall) and, before one knows it, one is thinking deeply about the world–barriers between people, roads not taken, […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mending Wall", Birches, Robert Frost, teaching | Comments closed
