At The Walrus, Georgina Blanchard reflects on the stillbirth of her son, Charlie Showman.
death
Posted inEditor's Pick, Nonfiction, Quotes
Choosing to Set Him Free: The Stillbirth of Charlie Showman
At The Walrus, Georgina Blanchard reflects on the stillbirth of her son, Charlie Showman.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Conversation in the Margins
What they don’t tell you about death—or what you don’t really understand until it happens close to you—is how permanent it is. In the months afterward I kept thinking to myself, all right, I get it. This is too painful. Let’s just take a little break from the loss. Let’s have a weekend off. A […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Ain’t No One Here But Just Us Chickens
Daniel Wallace killed a chicken — and it didn’t really change him. He reflects on the strange ease of poultry murder and the inevitability of death in this fun but sobering piece in the Bitter Southerner.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Feeding Your Grief
Isaac Blum writes in the Iowa Review about his young sister’s death, the shadow Heinz ketchup casts over his family, and the different ways people mourn.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Greenlanders Don’t Have Epitaphs on Their Gravestones
Nothing is set in stone, except of course your epitaph. In a recent essay for Aeon, Tom Pitock mused on the difficulty of writing his own father’s epitaph, and why we etch words on tombstones to remember people we loved. But not every culture uses epitaphs, as Pitock learned in Greenland: It took real effort to find the cemetery […]
Posted inNonfiction
Gravity
‘My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there.’
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Gravity
‘My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there.’
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Rise of Embalming
Ironically, it was this desire to be close to the dead that ultimately helped usher bodies out of the home. Embalming—which advanced as a science around the same time as the Civil War—allowed for the corpses of men who had died on far-off battlefields to return home for some semblance of the Good Death. “Families […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Hospital Chaplain Reflects on Poetry and Dying
A few weeks later, my friend sends me a copy of Dunn’s poem “A Coldness.” The speaker says about his sick brother, “From then on he was delusional, / the cancer making him / stupid, insistently so, and lost. / I wanted him to die. / And I wished his wife / would say A […]