More on: loss

In the middle of the day, I was lost in thought, staring at my newly dead father, or the portion of him the funeral home gave me back in a cheap little plastic urn I’d placed on my study’s mantle. I’d been reading about Bede’s sparrow, which, it turned out, was not Bede’s at all,…

—Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame. Black holes dissipate to God knows where, —Yet everything we’ve said and done remains —Like these lilies floating in this garden pool. Each name We’ve said, each paper lantern strung, each cross we’ll bear —In Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame —Yet floats forever here.…

Fifty years ago, in Catholic school, a nun gave my mother a ribbon said to have been touched by a saint. This was when her brother was still alive, and masses were still read in Latin, and people still wandered across the street to other people’s houses in the evening. Now the school is coming…

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.…

MY DEAREST KATIE, Do you remember that evening we flew together from Burlington in Vermont to Saint Paul in Minnesota? Do you remember how the wind came in off Lake Champlain and cut through the streets of Burlington like a sawblade, the snow blistering somewhere out over the lake? We flew just ahead of the…

So much sitting still these past months, hoarding my sorrows, looking out at another day’s news- paper being buried by the accumulating snow. I could be waking from a half-remembered dream that, no matter how I try, I’m unable to put together, my daily sighs a kind of catch-all for the poverty of everything I…

Our speaker has a tongue screw with him, though it is a replica. He speaks of spectacle, witness, dying well. One group’s criminals…. Stories are not preserved by accident. Heroes are made necessary by the nature of memory. Life is stronger than death, and that is why we must praise. I think. Identity depends on…

I have love And a child, A banjo And shadows. It was the light, always the light. First, that absent early hour when he woke to find the world made strange, knocked awry, as if creation had suddenly undone itself, the landscape dishonored by this loss. The dawn moved haltingly toward day. He would have…

The greatest evil is when you forget that you are the son of a king. —Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidism   Yet, aren’t I the son of Joe Terman, used car salesman? And wasn’t he the son of Abraham Terman, carpenter, until injured by a salami truck, or was it a cable car, on Cedar…

1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…