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 […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Alan’s Cancer vs. an Exquisite Corpse
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
Sir Gawain and a Friend’s Cancer
Just as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight supported me as I grieved for my son, so is it supporting me now as I interact with a close friend, a philosophy professor, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Alan’s tumors began in his neck and eyelid and have now migrated down to his lungs. […]
On Accepting Death and Living Life
The German philosopher Heidegger argues that, by refusing to face up to the fact that we are going to die, we human beings cut ourselves off from life as well. Essentially, by seeing death as a horrible thing, we deny that we are natural beings in a natural world. In so doing, Heidegger goes on […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Book of the Samurai, death of a child, Heidegger, sex, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed
The Death of My Oldest Son
I am devoting this week to a work that came to my aid when I was dealing with the death of my oldest son nine years ago. I will introduce you to Justin and then describe how a medieval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, helped give me images and a framework for the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged death of a child, Justin, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Comments closed
