Search Results for: Love

“Leave Us to Our Peace”: A Pact Made in Love

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At Outside, Eva Holland brings us a thoughtful piece about the right — and the privilege — of getting to die on one’s own terms.

Eric and Pam Bealer were the epitome of resourcefulness. Both artists lived in a remote area of Alaska. They raised animals and vegetables on a wild landscape that was often the inspiration for the art they created. After Pam was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the aughts, the couple enacted a plan to end their own lives at a time they chose.

Solovyov later told me that, when he saw the little boat crammed with art that March day, he should have known. For years, the couple had talked with close friends about their intention to die together when Pam’s time came. She did not wish to see her disease through; Eric did not plan to live without his wife. But it was one thing to talk about this in the abstract. It was another for Solovyov to stand in the harbor and realize that his friend had prepared his last exhibition. “He brought everything with him,” he said.

Isolated as the cabin was, they had a neighbor there, and his place had Wi-Fi, which they were able to use even when he was away. So they were generally in touch with people by e-mail. When that communication stopped, in mid-September, their friends took notice. They put the word out to folks in Pelican: If anyone was heading for Yakobi Island, could they look in on the Bealers?

On October 5, a pair of Pelican-area residents, a married couple, made the trip to the island. Leaving his wife in their boat, the husband hiked up a trail to the Bealers’ cabin. The screen door to the covered porch was open. He went in and found a plastic bin filled with packages and letters, and a note taped to the glass window of the main door, which was locked. On one side the note read: “Hello, if you are looking for the Bealers… Please read this. If you found this, please mail the attached packages. It will go to the people who will know what to do next and take care of things. Please accept the cash as a gift to pay you for your trouble, and postage for these packages and envelopes.”

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‘Grief is the Wake of Love’

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In this beautiful essay exploring gender identity and grief through the fantastical lens of professional wrestling, Gabrielle Bellot remembers a special childhood friend who died young. She mourns “all the relationships I never got to have with the people who never knew me as a woman.” Read the piece at Catapult.

When you feel small, it’s easy to dream big, big, big, and so that was what we did. We dreamed in the way that people in a small place dream, dreams in which you walk onto the glittering stage of the world and see a cheering crowd and get to smile and wave and say, Yes, you know my name now, blissfully stunned by the fact that foreigners actually know the name of our country. We dreamed of validation rather than the value we already had, because we were still convinced that we could only be successful if white people in America and Europe said we were, because the maelstrom logic of colonialism is that it leaves us despising our colonizing countries and seeking their approval all the same. We dreamed as Coleridge did of Xanadu, grand visions that slipped away at the last moment.

I wonder what Rezi would think if he saw the wrestler I had wanted to be, the woman I had wanted all the world to know. I wonder what he would think if he could see me now, not as some sparkling femme of the ring, but simply as the woman who walks to the subway in Queens to commute to work: curls long, lips fuschia or fiery or fairy-blue. I wonder if he would have jumped back, shocked, then muttered gruffly to keep my distance, what de hell wrong with you, saying he would hit me if I came closer—the defenses of anti-queerness he had worn for so long like everyone else I grew up with—or if, instead, he would have taken my hand, after a pause, and let me hug him, because secretly he knew she was in me all along.

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Orderly, dour, cowed: how my beloved Italy is changed by coronavirus

Longreads Pick

Holed up with his family in their Parma flat, Tobias Jones tells of the eerie atmosphere in a country usually known for sociability, chaos and fun.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 15, 2020
Length: 9 minutes (2,314 words)

The People We Love to Hate on Social Media

Marshall Ritzel via AP

If you’ve ever kept certain people visible in your social media feeds just because you loathed or envied them, or because you couldn’t tell the difference between envy and irritation, then Emily Flake’s New Yorker post is for you. In it, the talented cartoonist examines her unflattering insistence on following a certain artsy, nouveau-hippie family on Instagram who causes her constant side-eye. Flake is hilarious, and she’s as insightful in her drawings as she is in her writing. “There are so many ways to be a creep these days,” she says. “One of the easier ways is to follow people on social media toward whom you have feelings that are other than warm.” As she examines her pettiness, you might see yourself, as I have, in this snapshot of our cultural moment. But her attraction to this family is about a lot more simple envy.

My contemplation of the life of this rustically hip family takes on the “Is it this or is it that?” quality of those trick drawings: Is this an old woman in a babushka or a young one in a hat? Are the choices the hip family makes arrogant or inspiring? Stupid or brave? Maybe they’re both, in the way that my drawing is both, simultaneously. My side-eye at their neo-pioneer lifestyle is accompanied by a thrum of envy for the freedom of their life (Who works? Is there a trust fund at play here, or are they just that good at living off the land?) and a desperate, shame-filled recognition of the disparity between their towering competence and my obvious lack thereof. Who would you want to link up with in the coming apocalypse? The hot, fit, loving family who knows how to build a house by hand, or the tubby middle-aged broad who can’t even drive stick? Exactly. My ability to provide wry commentary about my own cervix is an asset useful only in a pre-collapsed society.

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The Lovely Hill: Where People Live Longer and Happier

Longreads Pick

Seventh-Day Adventists’ dietary philosophy has made Loma Linda, California one of the healthiest cities in the world, and it has a lot to teach the rest of the country.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 4, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,241 words)

They Fell In Love Helping Drug Users. But Fear Kept Him From Helping Himself

Longreads Pick

Many obstacles exist for people on parole who want medication-assisted opioid treatment. One obstacle is how much they trust their parole officer. It can cost people their lives.

Author: Will Stone
Source: NPR
Published: Feb 24, 2020
Length: 8 minutes (2,149 words)

Don’t Pretend Like You Don’t Love Wikipedia

Wikipedia: it’s the best trash fire on the internet. It’s sexist. There’s rampant trolling. You can lose hours of your life falling down a rabbit hole looking for information on that one guy from that movie. And you can learn about anything at all in recorded history, and it’ll probably be mostly true. At Wired, Richard Cooke penned a loving paean to the playground for pedants that’s the closest thing the internet has to a public square.

The site’s innovations have always been cultural rather than computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors’ passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David’s “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving.

And because I know it’s the thing you seized on while reading, here is Khanzir’s entry, and here is Khanzir:

In this photograph taken on July 12, 2016, an Afghan veterinarian administers an injection to a pig inside an enclosure at Kabul Zoo in Kabul. (WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)

You’re welcome.

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Finding Answers about Life and Love in the Mountain Death Zone

Sunset over Nuptse and Lhotse summits. Solu Khumbu. Nepal. (Photo by: Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

He lost his wife and children in a plane crash. Her marriage had crumbled. James Morrison and Hilaree Nelson were brought together by death and loss but united in love — for each other, for self challenge, and for the mountains — in their attempt to become the first adventurers to summit Lhotse and ski down. As Chris Ballard reports at Sports Illustrated, little did the pair know they’d be plagued by equipment delays, as well as adverse weather and avalanches as they made their historic attempt in the death zone.

Above them loomed the jagged outline of Lhotse, rising 27,940 feet, and, to the north, the shadow of Everest. Below stretched a vast expanse of white—ravines and gullies, frozen rivers of ice—and beyond that Nepal. Somewhere over the horizon lay everything the pair often tried to escape: the cities and highways, the clatter, the dark memories.

They communicated without words, conserving energy, James Morrison in front and Hilaree Nelson a few steps behind. Alpine ski blades framed their packs. They’d need to move fast at the summit; according to Morrison’s calculations, they had 12 hours before weather arrived. If they made it, though—if the chute was passable, if they maintained an elevated pace, if the winds held—they’d have a shot at doing something no human had: summiting and then skiing the Dream Line, a track of snow down the western side of the peak. Among mountaineers, it had become a Holy Grail.

Morrison and Nelson wanted to be the first to descend it, of course, but that was only one of the reasons they had traveled to the other side of the world, assuming risks some peers felt too great.

Their other motives were more elemental. And more complicated.

Though the fourth-highest peak in the world, Lhotse bears little of the cachet of its neighbor, Everest. Movies are not made about Lhotse. Thrill seekers do not crowd it. Swiss climbers first summited it in 1956, but its middle peak remained the highest unclimbed spot on the planet until 2001. Lhotse holds particular appeal for skiers due to its unusual architecture. Under the right conditions, a thin ribbon of snow traces a jagged line off the peak, curving through a narrow rock chute for 1,500 vertical feet before emptying out onto the 5,000-foot Lhotse Face.

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Love and Lhotse

Longreads Pick

James Morrison and Hilaree Nelson were brought together by death and loss but united in love — for each other, for self challenge, and for the mountains — in their attempt to become the first adventurers to summit Lhotse and ski down.

Published: Feb 6, 2020
Length: 20 minutes (5,207 words)

‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words

Longreads Pick

Memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel was working on this, her final personal essay, when she passed away on January 7th, 2020 from metastatic breast cancer. In the piece she reveals that as her health was declining, her marriage was unraveling, and that she was still wrestling with new information her mother finally revealed a couple of years ago: that her biological father was not the same man as the father she grew up with. With an introduction and end note from her editor and friend, Garance Franke-Ruta.

Source: GEN
Published: Jan 8, 2020
Length: 19 minutes (4,830 words)