Thinking about my dead son in this Christmas season brings to mind Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the lengthy poem that he wrote over the course of 17 years lamenting the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.Hallam was a young man when he died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Tennyson describes his […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Singing Carols in the Darkness
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christmas, grieving, In Memoriam | Comments closed
Unspeakable: A Father’s Suicide
Yesterday independent filmmaker Sally Heckel visited St. Mary’s and showed us her most recent film, Unspeakable. Sally is most known for Jury of Her Peers, which was an Oscar nominee in the dramatic live-action short category. As powerful as Jury of Her Peers is, I like Unspeakable even better. The film is about the suicide of her […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Snow Man", Add new tag, Sally Heckel, suicide, T. S. Eliot, Unspeakable, Wallace Stevens, Wasteland | Comments closed
Finding Peace for War’s Wandering Souls
Wayne Karlin In honor of Veterans Day, I attended a fascinating talk by novelist Wayne Karlin on his new book Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books, 2009). In addition to being a top-flight writer, Wayne, a neighbor and friend, is a Vietnam vet who regularly journeys to Vietnam […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "The Man He Killed", Thomas Hardy, Vietnam, Wandering Souls, war, Wayne Karlin | Comments closed
Breaking through Pain’s Solitude
I’ve had a chance to revisit the two classics that immediately came to mind the other day when I thought about literary depictions of pain. Both were as powerful as I remember. In D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the death of the mother goes on and on, page after page. As her son […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Body in Pain, Canticle for Leibowitz, D. H. Lawrence, Death of Ivan Ilych, Elain Scarry, Euthanasia, Leo Tolstoy, Pain, Sons and Lovers, Suffering, Walter Miller | Comments closed
Trading Stories with a Sick Friend
Virginia Woolf I have been reporting on the salons we have been holding to honor my friend and former colleague at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Alan Paskow. Alan has an aggressive cancer that has moved into his lungs, and while the outlook is not good, he and his wife Jackie (also a former colleague) […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alan Paskow, friendship, Paradoxes of Art, salons, Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf | Comments closed
Alan’s Cancer vs. an Exquisite Corpse
Colleagues of my friend Alan Paskow held another one of our salons Monday night. Alan is a former professor of philosophy at St. Mary’s College, now retired, who currently has cancer in his lungs. We have been meeting once a month or so to show our support and to generally reaffirm how important community is. Monday […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, cancer, In Memoriam, Surrealism | Comments closed
Literary Salons with One Who Is Dying
I have written about my close friend and colleague Alan Paskow, whose lungs (although he does not smoke) have been attacked by an aggressive cancer. One response of the community has been to gather for literary salons every two or three weeks. Anywhere from 15-20 people attend each one, despite busy schedules. In attendance are […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged David Lynch, Hamlet, In Search of Things Past, Marcel Proust, Mulholland Drive | Comments closed
Poetry for Mourning Michael Jackson
I am one of those strange people who has lived much of his life without a television, so I was unaware of the phenomenon of Michael Jackson for much of my life. But my family acquired a television in 1991, and even though Jackson was no longer in his glory years, his music videos still […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged D. H. Lawrence, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Michael Jackson, Piano, Spring and Fall | Comments closed
Emily Dickinson’s Deathbed Fly
Okay, here is a second post on poems about small winged pests, written in honor of President Obama’s cool and cold-blooded killing of a fly. When I was a child, I used to enjoy the poem about “the funny old lady who swallowed a fly.” It is one of those repetition poems, with a new […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Emily Dickinson, Gulliver's Travels, Hansel and Gretel, I heard a fly buzz when I died, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Lord of the Flies, The Flea, There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly, William Golding | Comments closed
