You have come to the right place, and we are glad you are here. This is a safe place to share stories of love and loss, devastating grief, exhausting care-giving, memorials, advanced directives, mourning, hope, and despair. We want to hear about about what you wish you had known or done differently, what you wish those around you had known or done differently, and what went right. We will never tell you to move on or find closure. "What cannot be said will be wept." Sappho
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Friday, April 11, 2025
Not people die but worlds die in them
People
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
Friday, March 28, 2025
"Everybody Thinks that You Are Dead, But I"
A Quoi Bon Dire?” by Charlotte Mew
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
And everybody sees that I am old
But you.
And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Don't Spread Your Loved One's Ashes in a Public Place
From Rick Reilly in the Washington Post
I know, I know. He was the greatest person to ever live and “deserves” to have an eternal “view” from Yosemite or from the banks of Golden Pond or from the top of the Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel.
Except 3.2 million people die every year in America, and, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, 62 percent ask to be cremated. That’s more than double the rate 20 years ago. And nearly half say they “would prefer to have their remains scattered in a sentimental place.” Which would mean nearly a million incinerated Americans annually coating the sequoias at Yosemite and choking the loons on Golden Pond and sprinkling the churros of Santa Monica. It’s just bad taste.
It can also be dangerous.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Witnessing Death
From CNN:
"Stories about shared-death experiences have been circulating since the late 19th century, say those who study the phenomenon. The twist in shared-death stories is that it’s not just the people at the edge of death that get a glimpse of the afterlife. Those near them, either physically or emotionally, also experience the sensations of dying."
Emily Levine Embraces Death
Emily Levine had stage 4 cancer when she gave this TED talk.
Life is an enormous gift, Levine says: "You enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back."
Sunday, January 12, 2025
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