More on: loss

1. MY LIFE HAS GOTTEN so unpleasant that I have to write it down. I’ve learned that nothing makes a bit of sense to me unless I write about it, like I’m getting old and can’t remember things or can’t see straight until it’s all spelled out in front of me. But that’s ridiculous; I’m…

Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved (both from Copper Canyon). Long known for his condensed and crafted style, in his recent work, Orr demonstrates a shift toward the personal lyric at its most stripped-down,…

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…

ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…

ONE SUMMER at the lake house, I forgot my swimming suit and found one of my grandmother’s—an old, plastic mold of a suit, perhaps unworn for twenty years—hanging like a replica of her younger body in the upstairs cedar closet. The suit smelled green and sweet, like the lake. When I pulled it onto my…

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.…

At Poulnabrone Dolmen Argyle poured his soul’s ache into the hole of sorrows, huddling under the ancient capstone against the cold and crueler elements. Stone portal, stone cairn, stone everywhere— the rocky desert of the Burren bore a semblance to his own hard-weathered heart made barren by years of cast aspersions, pox, maledictions, cursed loneliness…

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) The Man within My Head by Pico Iyer (Knopf, 2012) My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir by Meir Shalev (Schocken, 2011)  …