Tag: dying

Michael Gonzales reflects on the deaths of a dear friend, and a bookworm he idolized: David Bowie.

Yvonne Conza wrestles with the complexities of estrangement from her dying — complicated — dad.

At Oxford American, Michael Graff remembers his dad, Carl.

After his death, Emily Urquhart ‘sees’ her brother with regularity. Nearly 20 years later, stories and science help to explain why.

Carolita Johnson tallies the costs and benefits of love and cohabitation as a woman artist living in a patriarchy.

On the lowest paid, but perhaps most rewarding job at The California Medical Facility — a medium-security prison in Vacaville, CA.

Ken Otterbourg contemplates love and loss and what we remember when we try to forget.

Sometimes death takes a torturously slow, scenic route.

Jacqueline Dooley recalls her difficult transition from being a mother with earthly duties, to becoming one with more spiritual concerns for a teenage daughter with terminal cancer.

After a series of losses, Lillian Slugocki tries to make sense of death — and life in the wake of others’ passing.

“What they are doing is profiting from the sale of humans.”

A series of losses prompts s.e. smith to wonder why, if it’s inevitable, we tend to view death as failure.

To help demystify dying, Cory Taylor answers questions about what it’s like to have a terminal illness.

With the onset of death doulas, no one need die alone.

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 […]

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 […]