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?
Death & Dying
Grappling with the difficult questions of death and dying from a secular, nonreligious point of view.
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 […]
Posted inThe Secular
Is secular life bereft when tragedy strikes? Not for a minute
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the week since NFL player Damar Hamlin’s near death on the field, prayer has had a big moment: players bowing their heads and circling to pray before games, ubiquitous signs and social media posts bearing messages like “Pray for Damar,” TV commentators speaking of prayer—and in at least one case actually praying during coverage—with […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
Treat my body like vegetable peelings
Reading Time: 4 minutes New York legalizes composting of human remains, and the Catholic church sputters in futility.
Posted inDeath & Dying
Death: Every year, the probability increases
Reading Time: 4 minutes I was fortunate enough to swan through most of my life only rarely coming into contact with death. My grandparents, eventually (while I was away from home, either abroad or at university), one work colleague…but I think that was about it. Over the last few years, that has changed, and particularly over the last few […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
You gotta walk that lonesome valley
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ll be 91 in February. It may be my last birthday, or one of a final few, because my actuarial table is ticking away relentlessly. I have no fear of death. It’s simply the natural end of every life. It awaits all eight billion of us humans. Nobody can escape it. For now, I’ll just […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Aftersun’ perfectly captures the grief-memory connection
Reading Time: 6 minutes Some coincidences you can’t make up. On the day I watched Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, her masterful film on grief and memory, my daughter sent me a video of my now-deceased son Josh. He was laughing as we watched a silly YouTube cartoon on Christmas Eve a few years back. Oh, the mix of emotions this […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Can we handle the truth?
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). That’s good news to anyone who wants to be free, which is probably everyone. But what does truth have to do with freedom? And I guess a more pertinent question is the one Pilate supposedly asked later in the same […]
Posted inPolitics
Brittney Griner and the comparative worth of humans
Reading Time: 5 minutes What we value and how much we value any given thing is a subjective affair. We might look at price tags on things, but they are for guidance only. If you aren’t prepared to pay that much for a widget, you won’t buy one. You can try to haggle to arrive at a mutually agreeable […]
Posted inTrue Story
When absence outweighs presents: Grief and the holidays
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Nothing is something, where something is meant to be.” Nick Cave wrote those lyrics for Ghosteen, his album-length conversation with his dead son Arthur, and he was spot on. Even more, sometimes that nothing is everything. And loss alters everything, including our yearly observance of holidays. For many people, Thanksgiving and Christmas are already tough. […]