Reading Time: 17 minutes We are awash in a wide, traumatizing range of material evidence and emotional truth. And in the throes of active conflict, emotional truth will win out every time.
Death & Dying
Grappling with the difficult questions of death and dying from a secular, nonreligious point of view.
Posted inDeath & Dying
Never waiting for the miracle
Reading Time: 7 minutes None of this would have landed in my purview if I hadn’t stepped out on Christmas Eve last year with the last of my seasonal food hampers. I knew that only folks having the roughest of times would be out during Nochebuena, a holiday that finds folks here, from the poorest to the richest, with […]
Posted inCulture
On the death of an Average Joe
Reading Time: 5 minutes This week, amid surging Ukrainian drone strikes against Russia, Europe’s largest wildfire (yet), and the racist massacre of three Black citizens in Florida, a US veteran died of pancreatic cancer. He was 49 years old. Because he had put himself in the political spotlight, and because he had stayed there despite significant holes in his […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
James Haught lived life with no qualms
Reading Time: 5 minutes Bidding farewell to a giant of the freethought movement, and looking back at his achievements and the progress he bore witness to over nine decades.
Posted inTechnology
Stockton Rush and the Randian cult of the lone genius
Reading Time: 6 minutes Advocates of free-market capitalism such as Ayn Rand claim that progress comes about through solitary geniuses who defy the critics and do what everyone said was impossible. But in real life, innovators can’t overcome the laws of physics.
Posted inDeath & Dying
20 months without my son: On ruptures, migrations, transformations
Reading Time: 4 minutes A traumatic loss like my son’s suicide is a violent rupture. My beautiful boy, so uniquely alive despite his mental illness, is no longer a physical presence. The anticipation of helping him navigate the transition from adolescence into adulthood was suddenly, shockingly a dead dream.
Posted inDeath & Dying
Reflections on an afterlife destination called hell
Reading Time: 4 minutes Hell is a grave topic. Everyone is going there according to the doctrines of one religion or another. No one of us is safe. And for Eastern religions, every one of us has already been to hell many times over. Owing to spotty police work in antiquity, the idea of a torturous afterlife arose to […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
‘Skeleton Tree’ and ‘Ghosteen’: Grieving with Nick Cave
Reading Time: 6 minutes Since losing my son Josh in 2021, I look for a handful of traits in art that helps me grieve. Pressured to pretend my life is back to normal, I want words, images, and music that bear witness, that affirm my loss is bottomless, that yes, it is as bad as it feels. At the […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
Imagine there’s no heaven. Is it always easy if you try?
Reading Time: 4 minutes I have my own convictions about what happens after we die. As a person with a terminal illness, I’ve had good reason to explore the topic. But do I have to insist that others join me in that conviction?
Posted inPsychology
Peter Weir’s ‘Fearless’: Grief, the superpower nobody wants
Reading Time: 5 minutes Jamie Raskin’s got it. Nick Cave, too. I’ve got it. And in Peter Weir’s 1993 classic, Fearless, Max Klein has it. Thanks to trauma and loss, we are, like the movie title says, fearless. But we’d relinquish this superpower in a heartbeat, if our lives could rewind. When US Representative Jamie Raskin was in the […]