There are some things that should never be said to the dying. I’ve never bothered developing a comprehensive “no-no” list but years of parish ministry have attuned me to the particularly egregious. Continue Reading »
Another intrusive death is rising in my life, and not just my own. He was a vigorous seventy-eight-year-old until last November. Then he experienced a fall, and another, and swiftly lost his motor skills. In the space of just a few weeks he quickly went from cane to walker to wheelchair to bed. Continue Reading »
There’s a great old Twilight Zone episode (“Elegy”) in which future astronauts crash land on an asteroid that seems very much like earth. They look for help in a town—only to find all the people frozen in different tableaus: an unattractive woman winning a beauty contest, a man celebrating his election as mayor, etc. Continue Reading »
The sequence of three speeches of God in Genesis 3:14-19 (to the serpent, the woman, and the man) illustrates biblical justice, which is to say a justice that does more than punish ; it sets things right and corrects what is wrong. The sequence begins with the only curse God directs at a living . . . . Continue Reading »
The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by john gray farrar, straus and giroux, 288 pages, $24 Few historians of culture would think to suggest a similarity between the death throes of Victorian England and the first decades of Soviet totalitarianism—but . . . . Continue Reading »
John Hall Wheelock, a minor twentieth-century poet—dubbed “the last romantic” in the title of his oral autobiography—captured movingly some of the reasons we desire more life, our sense (nevertheless) that a complete human life cannot mean an indefinitely extended one, and the pathos . . . . Continue Reading »
In the Valley of the Shadow: On the Foundations of Religious Belief by James l. Kugel Free Press, 256 pages, $26 Whether we like it or not, death is a constant point of reference, an unavoidable horizon, a question mark over everything. Everyone, gravedigger or intellectual, atheist or fervent . . . . Continue Reading »
Nothing to Be Frightened Of by julian barnesknopf, 256 pages, $24.95 Death has many masks. He comes cruel with his sweeping scythe, cutting down men and women in their prime. He comes kind and compassionate as a nurse, closing the eyes of long-suffering patients. Death comes slowly and shyly behind . . . . Continue Reading »
Consider the obituary column in your local newspaper—not the obituary of anyone famous but just an ordinary obituary of an ordinary person from an ordinary place. Consider it first as a surviving family member or friend, the one who has to gather the information for the obituary and select . . . . Continue Reading »
You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always had an unusually keen appreciation of life, and not only because it has been stolen from them so often and so cruelly. . . . . Continue Reading »
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