I haven’t talked in a while about my friend Alan, who has experienced cancerous tumors in his neck, eyelid, lungs and brain. In each case they were either removed or radiated, allowing us to go on hoping that all would be well. Alan, after all, has already lived a year and a half longer than [...]
The relationship between a big sister and her baby brother is special. In fact, it’s archetypal. It doesn’t matter if she is in her 80’s and he is in his 70’s. Somehow he is still “little bro,” and when she can’t protect him the universe seems to have gone horribly wrong.
These thoughts came to me [...]
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 thrashing [...]
David Copperfield (1935)
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” writes narrator David Copperfield at the beginning of the great Charles Dickens novel. But why the uncertainty? Can’t we just decide to be the hero of our [...]
Posted in 20th Century, death and dying, poetry | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Beowulf, cancer, Catcher in the Rye, Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, In Memoriam, J. D. Salinger, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot |
Spiritual Sunday
I still haven’t gotten over the waterfalls at Yosemite—does one ever?—and so am sharing a spiritual interpretation of a waterfall by the 17th century mystical Anglican poet Henry Vaughan. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I have mixed feelings about Vaughan (especially by how he sees the natural world cordoned off from the [...]
On Monday I described my friend Alan as an Odysseus figure for the way he has coming back, time after time, in his battle with his cancer. He appreciated the article but was taken aback by the comparison and asked why I hadn’t compared him instead with someone like Holden Caulfield. He said he didn’t [...]
Posted in 20th Century, 8th century BCE, Epic, Novel, death and dying | Also tagged Anatomy of Criticism, Catcher in the Rye, Heroism, Homer, J. D. Salinger, Northrup Frye, Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight |
From time to time I have written about my friend Alan, who has been assaulted by a series of cancerous tumors that the doctors keep on removing, either through surgery or through radiation/cyberknifing. He has had tumors removed from his eyelid, his neck, both lungs (six in all from the lungs) and now, most recently, [...]
Robert Frost’s poems (as indicated by “Mending Wall,” which I wrote on yesterday) have the wonderful ability to move from the very specific to the universal. One begins with a small incident (two neighbors fixing a stone wall) and, before one knows it, one is thinking deeply about the world–barriers between people, roads not taken, [...]
Film Friday
Two weeks ago our Friday night film group watched Yojiro Takita’s Departures, the Japanese film that won the 2008 Best Foreign Film Oscar. Given our society’s discomfort with death, it is a film that people must see. (Caution: In the following reflection I’ll be revealing the ending.)
Departures is about a young Japanese man who [...]
I am still vibrating from the powerful student essays I received last week. I talked about one yesterday and will share another today. This is one from a student whose mother is dying of brain cancer.
Erica Rutkai (she is letting me use her name) decided to move from California to the east coast when it [...]
