Scott Korb contemplates disgust — his own, yours — at the kind of magical thinking that promises (with fingers crossed) to protect us from all the causes of dying.
death
Posted inEditor's Pick
I’ve Fled New York with My Wife, Kids and Dog – Just as my Ancestors Fled the 1918 Pandemic
After covering the plights of refugees around the world as a journalist, Bryan Mealer finds himself a refugee, fleeing New York City for his childhood home of west Texas — where his great-grandmother and her oldest daughter died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Posted inEditor's Pick
All That Is Lost and All That Is Remembered
On the 30th anniversary of her Navy captain father’s political execution, Naz Riahi recalls her love for him, and reveals a persistent grief that is always with her.
Posted inCommentary, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Seeding a Dark World with New Life
As she’s done before, Sara B. Franklin greets the specter of death by defiantly planting a life-sustaining vegetable garden.
Posted inHighlight, Quote Posts, Quotes
Closure in Service of Grief: the Septuagenarian Couple Who Locate Bodies Under Water
“What Gene and Sandy offer is not the hope of rescue, but the solace of finality. They have spent years crisscrossing North America in the service of grief.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
At Mrs. Balbir’s
Jillian Dunham traveled thousands of miles from home to get away from her grief. It found her anyway, in a stranger’s Bangkok apartment.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief
Five years after her mother’s death, while still grieving and suddenly middle-aged, Abby Mims turns to beauty products to cure what ails her.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
Elizabeth Wurtzel Made it Okay to Write ‘Ouch’
Today’s memoirists and personal essay writers owe a debt of gratitude to the Prozac Nation author for rewriting an inhibiting rule.
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words
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 […]
Posted inCuration, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
A Beloved Art Critic Sings His Swan Song
“Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.”