More on: death

after a photograph by Gordon Parks Of all his portraits of elderlies waiting on the mercy of their Master, this is most bitter by far once our mind pans away from some few pleasant, long ago moments we fancy the wallpaper’s many morning glories having seen, and down to our penultimate mystery captured by values…

M Y SISTER, SONDRA, stood on my porch smoking a cigarette, just like she does every Wednesday while her son practices soccer at the school three blocks from my house. “Alisa, you ever been around one of them savants? Like the one that was in that movie Rain Man?” Cigarette smoke rose and fought against the…

An old man was dying in the hospital, —-my friend the doctor told me. He was eighty-nine, his whole life a tailor in a shop —-below the room where he was born. He had no one, so a kind aide from Ghana —-sat with him, one hand in his the other holding her sandwich. The…

The following is a chapter in Richard Rodriguez’s new memoir, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, forthcoming this October from Viking.   GOD formed you of dust from the soil. I was a sort of an afterthought. A wishbone. He blew into our nostrils the breath of life and there we were. You were his Darling Boy…

Years ago somebody decided—I don’t know how this conclusion was reached—that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was cellar door. —Don DeLillo, interviewed in the Paris Review, 1993 i. cellar door / cellar door ———————–Two solid wooden doors hinged to open out leaning on a sloping ledge against the house. Within, a wooden…

grief and triumph were one and perennial, petals on the same rose, or the same rose by other names. —Kelly Cherry When Rachel was dying, and too weak any longer to sit up when visitors, crying, came to say their last goodbyes, she listened to her friend Deb’s prayers, whispered over the hospital bed. Then,…

JACOB FELT TERRIBLE: he had slept through the whole thing. The ambulance, the EMTs. It had happened at seven in the morning, and his alarm had been set for eight. Was it better or worse that no one else in the hall heard anything either? Mrs. Wilkinson had been taken away, and she had not…

CAR HEADLIGHTS from the Miami traffic outside brushed along the upper chapel walls, grazing the stained-glass windows and the cross suspended there. Ever since Esteban and I had entered the Lutheran church on Fifty-Seventh, we’d been silent. I shifted in the pew. Although Esteban had been carting me to youth group all of freshman year, this…

HOME, I SAY. I’m on the road, I say. I’m in class. No, it’s okay. What’s the matter? It was always the first question. Where I was would determine whether I could help. Where are you?—during those early months when I would pick up. He was locked out, he was stuck in the mud, etc.…

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…