Tag Archives: death of a child

Singing a Lullaby to a Dead Son

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2010

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Blaming Loved Ones in the Face of Death

By Robin Bates | Published: July 26, 2010

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 , , , , , | Comments closed

Dancing to a Bright Star

By Robin Bates | Published: April 30, 2010

Film Friday As this is Friday, I begin with a discussion of a film.  But as it is also the tenth anniversary of the drowning death of my 21-year-old son Justin, I plan to digress.  I trust you will allow me to embark on a bit of a ramble. The film I have chosen is […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Should Death Be Proud or Not?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 26, 2010

John Donne               Last December, in writing on Margaret Edson’s play W;t, I noted that I didn’t think John Donne’s famous sonnet “Death Be Not Proud” would be very useful in helping someone handle death.  (The dying Donne scholar in W;t doesn’t turn to it.)  Since then, a friend pointed out that John Gunther’s 1949 book […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Terabithia and Coping with Loss

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2009

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 […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

Trusting that Good Can Come from Ill

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2009

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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Death and Language’s Limitations

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2009

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 , , , , | Comments closed

A Death Poem Must Acknowledge the Pain

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2009

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 , , , , | Comments closed

Can Pastoral Elegies Ease the Pain?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2009

In a grad school class I once heard Peter Lehmann, a friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, say that, during the London blitzkrieg of 1940-41, all the London bookshops sold out their poetry. This means, I think, that in times of tragedy we turn to poetry for solace. It’s like the way that people who […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , | Comments closed