August 13, 2010
Note Tony Judt’s comments in this radio interview on “something after” his death in relation to those who knew him, family, close friends etc. Last week I talked to a recent widower and had a saddening conversation in which he could only talk of the finality, that he could no longer talk or touch or listen to his wife and I was reminded yet again we have no place to put death, to put grief and perhaps thinking and discussing this something after (the idea that someone continues to live on through our memory of them) could be a start.
May 24, 2010
Today we remembered a life that was lived fully and bravely, but ended too soon. The small man offered Jean Sibelius on violin to the remembering. A duo of him and Grandma talking about her good friend Anna. Ah music, sometimes it cannot be toppled. And he so solid, so strong, such a whole sound so redolent of that whole life lived I began with.
Conversations with good people full of love and sadness. In a small community. In a remote place. Dear Land of Home.
May 14, 2010
LRB: On thanatophobia and Vancouver
My first blog contribution to the London Review of Books Blog can be read here:
Things to Do in Vancouver When You’re Dead
A Saturday morning, the first in my 40th year, I’m at the Mountain View Cemetery for ‘The Final Disposition Forum: De-Mystifying Death, Funerals, Cemeteries and Ceremonies’. I’ve come to face my fear of being buried in Vancouver, where I’ve lived for the past decade. I arrive late, the film A Family Undertaking has already started. On screen a set of cold-looking turned-out feet. The acoustics are terrible. But the feet are a good set, the ubiquitous final set. I am reassured, when my moment comes, I too will have a set of absolutely dead feet.