I started smelling it on Wednesday, at first in quick bursts when the wind blew: The sour, thick stench of death somewhere in the yard. I was down by the driveway gate, putting a trash bag in the bin, and I noticed it and thought ew, something smells dead and got on with my business. The next day, I smelled it again. I was on the deck, watering plants, and it hit me like a…
A lady I work with died. Just up and died, 48 years old, after a stint in the hospital to have a procedure done. Details are scant. She was a sweet woman, great to work with, and now she is dead. Not because of anything she did, any risk she took or bad decision she made, but because of the unfortunate convergence of some random circumstances. She leaves a husband and a couple of children,…
My grandmother died Oct. 10. She’d spent the last few arduous months in and out of the hospital and back to the nursing home, then back to the hospital, battling rounds of infections and pain that kept her from resting peacefully enough to heal. She had fallen and hurt her shoulder and spine a couple of months ago and it just snowballed from there. She’d been in declining health for a couple of years, her…
I heard a (hip young) undertaker on Fresh Air today talking about cremation and embalming and death rituals and all that fun stuff, and it occurred to me that I am in my thirties and I have procreated and yet I still have not put on paper my wishes in the event of my untimely death, which is getting more and more statistically probable with every new day I draw breath. What am I waiting…
There is a spider just outside the front window. She is suspended on a single thread, bisecting it between the points where it is attached to the pane. She’s halfway between her origin and her destination, dangling and swaying back and forth in the breeze. She’s dead. Kicked ye olde bucket while making a go at another web: her first, seventh, dozenth, hundreth — who really even knows but her. There is just the one…
I love this: His voice quavering, the son of Seamus Heaney has told mourners of his father’s final words, minutes before his death. At a requiem mass in Dublin, crowded with mourners, Michael Heaney described how the poet and Nobel laureate, who died last week at the age of 74, had chosen Latin for the message to his wife, Marie. His last words were “in a text message he wrote to my mother just minutes…
Bernie Mac’s passing is sad enough. But Isaac Hayes? I was lucky enough to have Hayes as my commencement speaker when I graduated from college in 2004. Yes, he said “Hello, children” to us. The acoustics were shit so I had a hard time hearing a lot of the rest of his speech, even though I was in the front row. When it was time to do the deed, I walked across the stage, got…
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