More on: death

DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, Ray Martin ran into a crowd at an early season indoor track meet, hundreds of kids in a dozen colorful uniforms lounging all over, if they weren’t high-stepping in some warm-up ritual dance or actually lining up for a sprint. Everywhere you looked there were perfectly formed bodies, as if there’d been…

In the moment my father died, we did not want to spend Another dollar for the twenty-four hours He would no longer be living In the Willow Haven full-care facility. We lobbied the nurses to credit the last moment He breathed among us. It was four-thirty am, April 26, 2007. Who in their right mind…

You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned.…

The Moveen lads were opening a grave in Moyarta, for Porrig O’Loinsigh, got dead in his cow cabin in between two Friesians, their udders bursting, his face gone blue. “As good a way to go as any, faith,” said Canon McMahon the parish priest. “Sure, wasn’t our savior born in such a place?” Unmoved by…

When they heard from his friend, the woman, that he’d escaped the cave, they’d already forgotten how Lazarus once had come out at his command, although they protested, fearing he’d bear some unholy perfume that would make fools of all who saw the miracle. That dead man, sweet as clean laundry, even ate some dinner,…

for Murray Baumgarten At night, under wraps, often none too soon, the ghetto gave up what it must—bodies rowed in silence across the long lagoon. Bora winds scattered dust on canvas shrouds intended to disguise Venetian Jews as freighted cargos—to ward off spit and stones. Dust and water, all the ablution Venice would bestow, faceless…

En el Nombre del Padre   ON THE NIGHT of our grandfather Papa Tavo’s death, Tío Gonzalo was watching the midnight replay of that week’s Lucha Libre, the only kind of wrestling he would watch. Like she did on so many other Saturday nights, our Tía Victoria had gone to bed early because even though…

I’VE NEVER GIVEN myself an enema in front of anyone,” Christy says. We have arrived at a new stage in our friendship. And technically she’s not giving herself an enema in front of me. She readies what looks like a baster for a small turkey, and then I sit in the anteroom, next to the…

May you die as did that good man William Blake who, shortly before, broke into singing; before that, called his wife an angel and drew her, not just her face, but her whole and spiritual body. Closer to it, he said he would forever be near to care for her. After that, and after the…