This past week, appropriately enough when Mexicans celebrated the Day of the Dead, we witnessed four different facets of death and the reactions it elicited from different people.The massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue, ironically named The Tree of Life, was a horror that left decent people speechless. It's precisely on those occasions when the president …
Tag: death and dying
On turning 70, gratefully
Sandwiched between Christmas and New Year's, my birthday on December 30 traditionally has been half-forgotten but not this year, when I will hit the big Seven-Oh. Birthdays that end in zero are usually met with anticipation; they mark a passage to a new stage in life. When we turn twenty, college graduation and the beginning of a career—even …
What should churches do about death?
People keep dying around us. One here, one there, or if not dead, seriously ill.We received our latest death notice one evening earlier this week, while watching TV: One of our oldest friends in San Miguel had died Tuesday afternoon at the hands an implacable posse of cancers and other ailments that had tormented her …
How near is your End?
For several days in November, after he turned seventy, Stew grew glum and picked up the annoying habit of starting sentences with "I've been thinking..." without ever getting to the predicate.Thinking about what exactly?Apparently Stew was bothered by visions of a Piper Cub flying overhead pulling a banner that said "The End is Near. Do …
How should we remember the dead?
Despite the reading of some irreverent and even humorous poems by Billy Collins about death and dying, Sunday's Unitarian Fellowship service for the Day of the Dead was a somber affair. We commemorated the passing of both, prominent members of the congregation as well as people known only to individual congregants. About a dozen people, …
Memorial for someone we didn't know
Sally lived in San Miguel but, for Stew and me, she was a bedridden unknown. We inquired about her periodically, but her brother Doug, one of our best friends here, would only mutter, predictably, "Oh, she's about the same."Sally, 77, died on September 28 from the multiple sclerosis that had kept her barely conscious, in …
How I lost my faith in prayer
Over the past eighteen months, a random chain of events has effectively wiped out my faith in the power or even the sense of prayer.Chief among these events was, ironically, our attendance at a newly organized church in San Miguel. Then came the death of a contemporary named Louie, whom we knew only briefly but came …
The decline and demise of everybody
One of the oddest books I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, is Roz Chast’s “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?”She’s a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine and her book, illustrated with cartoons, handwritten text and a few photos, zigzags with hilarity and grimness through a reality no one wants to talk about: The …
When people turn off their light
Sundays Stew and I attend a free-form church service that compared to a traditional religious to-do looks more like an informal gathering around a coffee table decorated with a dozen votive candles and a sprinkling of bougainvillea petals plucked from bushes outside the door. The program is a one-pager whose order and content can vary from …
El Rancho Santa Clara 