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Sunbeams

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all.

Abraham Lincoln

Sunbeams

Life, the permission to know death.

Djuna Barnes

Bullet In The Brain

After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”

As We Lay Dying

Stephen Jenkinson On How We Deny Our Mortality

At every deathbed and hospital room, I didn’t see sane dying. I saw sedated dying, depressed dying, isolated dying, utterly disembodied dying. Sane dying would require a childhood steeped in death’s presence, an adulthood employed in its service, and an elderhood testifying to its necessity. Sane dying is a village-making event: lots of people with plenty to do, the whole production endorsing life.

The Whole Inexplicable Business

A Tribute To Steve Kowit

Steve Kowit was a gifted poet and a compassionate human being. He was enthusiastic and outspoken, both on and off the page. . . . Kowit once said that he wanted to “move the reader with memorable tales that celebrate the whole inexplicable business — this strange, unspeakably marvelous life,” and that is exactly what he did.

While We Waited

My mother became a missing person in the summer of 1994, when I was fourteen. The day she disappeared, she told my father and me she was going to the Piggly Wiggly in Lineville, about ten miles from our home in Delta, Alabama. She didn’t come back.

Enigma

Each year on April 25 my mother calls to remind me that it’s the anniversary of my father’s death, so I should take a moment to think about him.

A Kiss For Mrs. Sissle

We did come upon a low cave, ten or so feet to the back, but there was nothing inside except empty beer bottles and a white paper bag shaped like a cat. So we sat like castaways at its entrance, knees touching, and watched the hourglass glitter of the moon on the black surface of the ocean. That was all. It was my first experience of nervous teenage heaven, and I doubted I would ever know anything so fragile and sublime again.