Remembering my son’s death brings to mind a beautiful elegy by John Dryden.
Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” about two brothers learning to bond, captures some of the bonding I am doing with my second brother over our father’s illness.
Poetry by E. A. Robinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay played a key role in my cousin’s memorial service.
The death of a beloved cousin is throwing me into the primal pain described by Tennyson and Auden.
A dying professor in Gail Godwin’s novel “The Good Husband” turns to John Donne’s “Second Anniversary” to comfort her.
The Pedro Almodovar film “Volver” explores the longing the love will prove more powerful than death.
One of my students is exploring her mother’s terminal illness, and her own grieving, through Gail Godwin’s novel “The Good Husband.”
This past year I have learned, in a new and powerful way, that the Faustus legend is a powerful exploration of the meaning of life and death. This is thanks to Caitie Harrigan, a senior at St. Mary’s who has been writing her senior project on the legend. As Caitie told me recently, she never [...]
“Troubled Water,” a 2008 Norwegian film about a horrendous crime, brings out the depth and humanity of everyone involved.
I share Tennyson’s wonderful poem “Crossing the Bar” in memory of an old Navy friend who died this past week.
Even in his final days, Christopher Hitchens was having active discussions about novels, poems and plays. He understood how much was at stake in literature.
Nobel laureate Thomas Tranströmer’s poem “After a Death” accurately captures how it feels to lose someone you love.
In the memorial service held in honor of my philosophy colleague Alan Paskow, we listened to some observations Alan recorded about his favorite poem, Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” I share them with you here. Alan recorded them for his funeral service and I think I understand why.
Last Thursday we had our memorial service for my friend Alan Paskow, the philosophy colleague whom I have written about several times. In my own remarks I invoked Plato’s Crito. I said that, for the three-plus years that Alan lived with the diagnosis of a terminal illness, he was like Socrates after having drunk the hemlock He knew that he was dying but he used his illness as an opportunity to explore with others what it meant. Like Socrates, he was a teacher to the end.
Since I know that some of you are dog lovers and have had the experience, as I did three years ago, of “putting your pet down,” I offer you this poem by Daniel Groves” called “A Dog’s Life.” It is sad and playful both and may bring a smile amidst the tears.
In “The Beauty of Death,” Kahlil Gibran orders his friends not to mourn him when he dies but to celebrate instead. “Let me rest, for my soul has had its bounty of days and nights,” he says. When Alan learned that he only had a limited number of months to live–months that he managed to stretch to four years–he made sure that he reaped each day’s bounty. He spent a lot of his time intoxicated with the beauty of it all.
When W. B. Yeat died on January 28, 1939, a despondent W. H. Auden wrote, “The day of his death was a dark cold day,” an instance of how we look to the weather for confirmation of our distress. The idea of a dying friend slipping away without leaving a trace is an unsettling one. Much better if the weather functions as a second witness, which it seems to do if it metaphorically expresses how we feel. When my good friend Alan Paskow died on Tuesday, I latched on to the fact that the day began with a tornado alert and that we were lashed by slashing rain for much of the morning.
My friend Alan Paskow is in his final days. Although not in a coma, he appears in perpetual sleep, and each day his breathing is more labored. Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death Bed” captures some of the experience of waiting and watching.
My friend Alan Paskow is finally dying. The poem that comes to mind is Mary Oliver’s “Universal Hospital, Boston.” All around nature is thriving, a contrast with the clean antiseptic rooms within the hospital. The contrast shows up as well in the patient’s eyes, which “are sometimes green and sometimes gray,/and sometimes full of humor, but often not.”
As I wrote last year when the earthquake hit Haiti, all human language, even literature, comes up short when faced with disaster and death. Literature is language by humans about humans, and destruction on this scale seems to laugh narrative and image to scorn. Nevertheless, being human, we try to bring even apocalyptic disasters into a [...]
Spiritual Sunday Several times over the past few months I have rhapsodized over Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, feeling a little bit like Keats upon first reading Chapman’s Homer. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into its ken,” the poet writes, perfectly capturing the experience. One reason I [...]
Spiritual Sunday Last week I wrote about how my friend Alan, beset with cancer, has beenexploring the meaning of love as his health fails. Here’s a beautiful George Herbert poem that captures Alan’s love for creation, his sadness that he must leave it, and (perhaps) his sense that his love may transcend death. Even though [...]
From time to time I bring you updates about my friend Alan Paskow, currently failing because of cancer. Julia and I visit the Paskows every Sunday night. Julia administers a Reiki massage to Jackie while Alan and I converse. In our recent visits, Alan is always in bed when I talk to him. Our conversation [...]
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 [...]
On Saturday I wrote about how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 14th century Arthurian romance, demonstrates that our fear of death keeps us from living as fully as we could. The Green Knight’s promise to us is that, if we change the way we approach death, we will live life with heightened intensity [...]
Here is a resolute poem of faith in the face of death by Emily Bronte, who I wrote on this past week. When she died three years after composing it, she did so with a fortitude that showed that she wasn’t just spinning words. Perhaps it can fortify others going through tragedy and loss. [...]
Sports Saturday Today’s post is on the sport of hunting (I’ll get to the Super Bowl next week). I should warn you that some of the passages you will encounter will be graphic. They are taken from the 14th century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I am teaching at the moment. As [...]
In addition to my regular classes, I am also teaching a course on novels by Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte at a local retirement center. The class has 15 students, all of them women, and I began it with several poems by Emily Bronte, the best poet of the sisters. A lyric about grieving [...]
Spiritual Sunday Today’s post I dedicate to those who lost loved ones in the Arizona shootings—and to everyone else who has lost someone close in the past year or so. I offer up a poem by the 17th century poetry Henry Vaughan that gets at some of the mood swings that the mourners can expect [...]
At the end of yesterday’s memorial service remembering those who died in the tragic Tucson shooting, the president of the University of Arizona read a poem by W. S. Merwin, recently named our poet laureate. I found a copy of it on the University’s Poetry Center website, along with the following wonderful quotation by Merwin [...]
Film Friday – 2010 in Review One of my favorite holiday films is the comic melodrama Family Stone (2008), the story of a family’s Christmas reunion. Despite their determination to put on a happy front, the family must face up to a number of underlying tensions. Foremost among these is the mother’s terminal cancer, [...]
