I haven’t updated you for a while on my friends Alan and Jackie Paskow, former St. Mary’s colleagues. Alan has been suffering from terminal cancer for close to three years now, and Julia and I visit every Sunday night. Julia performs Reiki massage on Jackie while Alan and I talk. This past Sunday, while […]
Tag Archives: death of a child
Singing a Lullaby to a Dead Son
From time to time I have reported on my friend Alan, who is dying of cancer but who continues to hold his head up and, to the amazement of us all, refuses to get depressed. We held another one of our salons in his honor this past Thursday. After hearing Alan report on the latest […]
Terabithia and Coping with Loss
Last week my library discussion group talked about the children’s classic and Newberry award winner Bridge to Terabithia (1977), by Katherine Paterson. It has been our tradition each December to choose a children’s book in honor of the holiday season. Bridge to Terabithia, we discovered, fits the season well. Warning: I reveal the ending in […]
Trusting that Good Can Come from Ill
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christopher Marlowe, Death of Ivan Ilych, Doctor Faustus, Heart of Darkness, In Memoriam, John Milton, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Name of the Rose, Pain, Paradise Lost, Rachel Kranz, Suffering, Umberto Eco Comments closed
Death and Language’s Limitations
In spending the last two weeks discussing how poetry can come to our aid in a season of death, I have been exploring how poetry responds to its greatest test. Death and dying can trigger our deepest fears, generate panic, denial and anger, prompt us to question everything we believe in, and send on frantic […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged A. H. Tennyson, cancer, Gail Godwin, In Memoriam, The Good Husband Comments closed
A Death Poem Must Acknowledge the Pain
For today’s entry on poems that can come to our aid when we are confronting death, I will be looking at two. In both poems, the speaker has lost a loved one. One of them, which I have known and loved since high school and whose sentiments I agree with, now angers me. The other, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Funeral Blues, Highland Mary, Robert Burns, Stop All the Clock, W. H. Auden Comments closed
