Death, never rewritten
Odd what catches one’s eye. In Saturday’s Oregonian, a story about a man’s death at the coast invited a quick read. Why I’m not sure. The story was terse, as such stories usually are and have to be...
View ArticlePunctuation for the dead
Some news stories I can’t get out of my head. They keep reverberating with questions. Take the post-mortem wishes of two men, one an astronaut wanting to return to space, the other an actor astronaut...
View ArticleArt after death
Insane, abandoned, and anonymous. This describes many people who lived out there lives at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, starting in 1883 and into the 1970s. Their cremated remains were put in...
View ArticleDeath and the Skeptic
Tonight on NPR’s “Philosophy Talk” I heard this declaration referring to death: “The world as I know it will cease to exist,” and then there will be nothing. When I heard this somber reminder of what...
View ArticleNo One Chooses
Nearly a decade ago, a sudden medical problem made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. What had I done to deserve the infamy of croaking in Costco?
View ArticleDeath and the Triple Wow
Leave it to Steve Jobs to depart this world with words of wonder. In another context his last utterance would have been overused slang, a reflexive expression lacking meaning. Oh wow. Not so with Jobs...
View ArticleMessage from the Grave
Walking among the graves of strangers on a sunny spring afternoon made me neither sad nor worried about mortality. It did have another effect: the sparse information on tombstones left me imagining the...
View ArticleEncounters at Death’s Door
I entered the room of a dying woman, my father’s widow, living her final days under hospice care. Her eyes searched through the dim light, settling on my face for a moment then fixing on something,...
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