My mother’s ‘passing’ has crippled my writing. And apparently that’s not all. It would be unfair to blame her, per se, because that would be rude. But I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that she’s had a hand in it. Some lesson left to teach. I thought what would be fitting (I had this brilliant idea […]
Tag: death and dying
My plan was that nobody else would die. Ever. My plan was to leave the death-and-dying biz to someone else; give someone else a turn. My plan was that enough was enough. At least for this year. My plan was that only the elderly die, and that sometimes it’s a blessing and an end to […]
Categories
the end of memory
It’s a very simple proposition: what if we forget? What if we forget the details? What if we forget their faces? What if they become reductionist cartoons, selective memory, fixed inside our stories, unverified by outside confirmation? What if they were not at all as we remember them? What if we got the stories wrong? […]
The very last Harry Potter film ever opened today. And yes — I saw it. And I’ll see it again tomorrow. The ritual of seeing HP movies on opening day with friends is apparently sacred. And I blew it saying yes to one friend and oops to the other. My attempt at a save is […]
Categories
the doors
I live for the doors. I wait for them. It’s an exercise in great patience. Endurance even. First off, however, this is not a post about Jim Morrison. Though it could be. He walked through these doors as well. So. I wait for doors. Wait for them to open. I watch them start to shut. […]
I’ve never worried about the SJSU parking garages. All these many years of night classes, of colleagues and students getting police escorts back to their cars at night — I’ve never once seen the necessity. And I don’t see it now, either. And yet, last night, while I was heading for my own car in […]
The funeral was so fast! Her brother was leading people off to head for a gathering at the house, one last time. One of the chapel people, said “Stop — we haven’t said a kaddish!” Some of us had been waiting for a kaddish. But he was adamant — she wouldn’t want a kaddish. Just […]
That’s what he called them. “The happiest couple in America.” And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, the spell was broken and she was gone. I mean, where do you go from there? Repeat cycle? Which would mean more of the same. And if there was more of the same, would […]
Dad and I were talking about the “kaddish in two-part harmony” project the other night, and he muttered something about spending a career dealing with death. I’d never quite put it together that his thirty years in the Social Security Administration had had him dealing with death all the time—well, duh! So I asked him to write a guest essay about what that was like.
So. The bookstore the other day — One of Malkah’s favorite things to do on planet Earth was to go with the tzaddik on his frequent forays into the dark and gloomy bowels of used bookstores. Holmes Books, in San Francisco, was one of their favorites together. The tzaddik would give Malkah a whole […]