Tag: Death

• April 28, 2012

  ‘My sad smile corrects her’

  Joan’s PET scan came back negative. The doctors don’t know what the spot on her lung is. Maybe just a scar. Joan turned 89 the week before last. Today she said, “Eight-year-olds are such a marvel. They see and say so much.” We drank champagne on her birthday and, with her two sons and also…
• March 7, 2012

  Of an African horse and a mad-grinning man

  So I’m at, what?, 54th and 6th and there’s this horse right? and I’m thinking Af–shushu–fric–shushu–ca and what the fuck right? because I must’ve heard Africa from the mouths of this pea-coated couple standing on the corner somewhere before who knows when walking whereto and why the fuck am I thinking Africa as this horse on 54th and 6th…
• February 6, 2012

  On death scenes and final words

  Montaigne muses in an early essay about the possibility that the true test of a life may be how well we act in our final scene. How well have we prepared ourselves for death? How do we face it? Do we regard it with equanimity? With cowardice? With ennui? Today, we rarely face it at…
• January 27, 2012

  On first words, last lines, and final thoughts

  It was while lying in bed beneath the flowered sheets that I’d read to her the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway and we’d loved. “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” And it was while lying on the grass beside the northern spring lake that she’d read, less enthusiastically, the opening lines of To…
• December 28, 2011

  On night visions and homecomings

  On the way to the airport well before dawn, my middle sister told me about the recurring nightmares she’d had when she was a girl. There was the one about the angry man with the red eyes. The one about my mother who’d become the mean witch from the Wizard of Oz. And the one…