Will John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” help one handle the fact that one has cancer? It is significant that the cancer victim and Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t is rejecting her poet by the end of the play. I’m actually not sure whether this particular poem would help any cancer patient. There’s a […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Wit Won’t Cushion Us against Death
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Death Be Not Proud", "If Poisonous Minerals", John Donne, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed
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", cancer, John Donne, Margaret Edson, W;t | Comments closed
Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New
I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases. In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam. For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]
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Dead Hands Reaching Out to Comfort
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s. Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are […]
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Singing Carols in the Darkness
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 […]
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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
