Just a little note en passant to say thank you to those people who visit this blog even though I haven't posted on it for nearly a year. I'm really pleased that there's stuff here that some people (you can't all be robots, surely??) might find interesting.
I don't log on very often, so I was very surprised to see the number of visits people have been making.
You might like to know that similar preoccupations to the ones you're finding here also crop up on my current blog,
http://whatthewatersays.blogspot.co.uk/
where you would of course also be very welcome. I write less there about funerals, rather more about meditation, being in the moment, and the world around me, and of course, occasionally about mortality. So you can stay with my journey if you'd like to.
all the very best, and do comment if you'd like to.
gloria/cerrig1
Saturday, 28 May 2016
Monday, 2 March 2015
Goodbye and hello
I feel this blog is coming to the end of its days, so I am going to sign off in a mo. All my mighty words will still be here until...? Google kills Blogger off? The End of Time? But my very close friend Tim Clark, aka tcerrig, is going to carry forward the role of blogging thoughts about mindfulness, mortality, and the other things I've been bending your ears with over the last few years. Gloria is done. She's taking the cure, handing the Grand Prix du Cote du Rhone to Tim. Please visit his blog, "What the Water Says." No, I'm not sure what the hell he means either, but anyway, he'd be pleased to see you at:
http://whatthewatersays.blogspot.co.uk
which he is just getting going. The title to this post will take you there, via cursor-magic and clicking.
Here's a few bridging words from my successor:
"Blessings upon your retirement Gloria. I shall endeavour to share worthwhile thoughts with the world, on subjects related to mortality, meditation, silence, the natural world, but possibly not Hornby Double-O trains sets, nor Aston Villa. I do hope your readership, which probably thought your unusual silence meant you had kicked the bucket, keeps an eye on my ramblings. I think I may have useful things to say to certain sorts of people. Give me a try."
So there you have it. Thank you for reading my words, thank you for comments. The Queen is dead, long live the King. Of what, you'll have to decide.
http://whatthewatersays.blogspot.co.uk
which he is just getting going. The title to this post will take you there, via cursor-magic and clicking.
Here's a few bridging words from my successor:
"Blessings upon your retirement Gloria. I shall endeavour to share worthwhile thoughts with the world, on subjects related to mortality, meditation, silence, the natural world, but possibly not Hornby Double-O trains sets, nor Aston Villa. I do hope your readership, which probably thought your unusual silence meant you had kicked the bucket, keeps an eye on my ramblings. I think I may have useful things to say to certain sorts of people. Give me a try."
So there you have it. Thank you for reading my words, thank you for comments. The Queen is dead, long live the King. Of what, you'll have to decide.
Sunday, 11 January 2015
"Je Suis Charlie" says Gloria Mundi - part 2
Will Self put it neatly on Channel 4 TV news the other evening. He pointed out that if you make freedom of speech (and drawing) a universal, non-negotiable right, you are turning it into something like a religious absolute, something to be seen as the same everywhere.
The murderers in Paris last week were, they said, acting in the name of a religious absolute.
Self pointed out that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, in a French concept, are directed not at those in power, but at the relatively powerless French Muslims. I suppose you could argue that those cartoon aimed at the Prophet were aimed at a very powerful figure, but in the context of France today, I can see his point.
Typically, political and social satire/caricature has been aimed, in this country at least, at those in power. The great caricaturists of the 18th and early 19th century attacked the Establishment, including at times the monarchy (if with a degree of caution) No-one murdered them.
Freedom of speech must be continually re-assessed in the societies in which it occurs. We do not and should not tolerate words and images designed to stir up anti-semitism; that is not necessarily to say we should automatically outlaw cartoons about Jews or Jewish matters.
And incidentally, "we must respect all religions." I don't know about that. It depends what religions and their followers say or do. The Christians have a saying: "by their fruits shall ye know them." Respecting religion, whatever it advocates; caricaturing anyone, in whatever fashion? H'mmm. I'd rather satire served its ancient purpose of making the powerful loook ridiculous when they are being ridiculous.
A cartoon would need to be examined for its intentions, as it were, and likely effects - the sort of thing that happens in a court of law sometimes. The difficulty seems to arise when the view of what is acceptable, "fair game," as it were, collides with an absolute, of the sort that characterises doctrinaire religious or political beliefs.
No-one in the Soviet Union of the 1940s got away with satirising Stalin for long. Absolutists have little sense of humour and take themselves absurdly seriously.
So the issues around Charlie Hebdo may be more complex and challenging than many on the streets of Paris today would accept. But the cartoonists drew pictures, and they were met with cold-blooded murder. The asymetry horrifies people around the world, and whatever the cartoons were like, today, it is simply and I feel rightly a matter of "Je Suis Charlie."
The murderers in Paris last week were, they said, acting in the name of a religious absolute.
Self pointed out that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, in a French concept, are directed not at those in power, but at the relatively powerless French Muslims. I suppose you could argue that those cartoon aimed at the Prophet were aimed at a very powerful figure, but in the context of France today, I can see his point.
Typically, political and social satire/caricature has been aimed, in this country at least, at those in power. The great caricaturists of the 18th and early 19th century attacked the Establishment, including at times the monarchy (if with a degree of caution) No-one murdered them.
Freedom of speech must be continually re-assessed in the societies in which it occurs. We do not and should not tolerate words and images designed to stir up anti-semitism; that is not necessarily to say we should automatically outlaw cartoons about Jews or Jewish matters.
And incidentally, "we must respect all religions." I don't know about that. It depends what religions and their followers say or do. The Christians have a saying: "by their fruits shall ye know them." Respecting religion, whatever it advocates; caricaturing anyone, in whatever fashion? H'mmm. I'd rather satire served its ancient purpose of making the powerful loook ridiculous when they are being ridiculous.
A cartoon would need to be examined for its intentions, as it were, and likely effects - the sort of thing that happens in a court of law sometimes. The difficulty seems to arise when the view of what is acceptable, "fair game," as it were, collides with an absolute, of the sort that characterises doctrinaire religious or political beliefs.
No-one in the Soviet Union of the 1940s got away with satirising Stalin for long. Absolutists have little sense of humour and take themselves absurdly seriously.
So the issues around Charlie Hebdo may be more complex and challenging than many on the streets of Paris today would accept. But the cartoonists drew pictures, and they were met with cold-blooded murder. The asymetry horrifies people around the world, and whatever the cartoons were like, today, it is simply and I feel rightly a matter of "Je Suis Charlie."
Thursday, 8 January 2015
"Je Suis Charlie" says Gloria Mundi
So, big deal announcement, but:
We must all be Charlie, now and always.
Such lethal derangement cannot "win" anything. What have these psychopaths achieved? They have caused death, grief and suffering to a group of people. They have put French Muslims at risk from "revenge" attacks. They have provoked strong condemnation from Muslim organisations in Europe and elsewhere. They have united the French people - almost all of them - and strengthened their determination not to give way to panic. And they claim this has "avenged the Prophet?"
Like most people with totalitarian mentalities, they are stupid as well as vile. In their own terms, they have achieved nothing.
They have achieved nothing of any significance, any more than the psychopaths who burst into schools and murder schoolchildren achieve anything.
Nous sommes Charlie, maintenant et toujours, or we give way to murderous fascists.
We must all be Charlie, now and always.
Such lethal derangement cannot "win" anything. What have these psychopaths achieved? They have caused death, grief and suffering to a group of people. They have put French Muslims at risk from "revenge" attacks. They have provoked strong condemnation from Muslim organisations in Europe and elsewhere. They have united the French people - almost all of them - and strengthened their determination not to give way to panic. And they claim this has "avenged the Prophet?"
Like most people with totalitarian mentalities, they are stupid as well as vile. In their own terms, they have achieved nothing.
They have achieved nothing of any significance, any more than the psychopaths who burst into schools and murder schoolchildren achieve anything.
Nous sommes Charlie, maintenant et toujours, or we give way to murderous fascists.
Monday, 5 January 2015
Celine Dion and me - funeral music
The impossibly wealthy and successful Ms Dion is not really my thing, to put it mildly. The whole big voice power ballad overwrought style leaves me cold.
But. Many a British funeral is for, or is organised by, men who don't like to talk much about their feelings. There are often comments about how he loved banter and leg-pulling, how dry his sense of humour was, how his children knew he loved them even though he didn't tell them often. (Or ever....)
That's how these chaps are, or how they were. We celebrants serve them, we don't criticise or judge, I hope.
Enter Miss Dion (or Houston, or Carey.) Enter Andrea Bocelli duetting with Dion or Brightman. Enter the big throbbing ballad, the singers for whom "I" must be delivered as "HI.."
If pop music is the soundtrack of our lives, these belters are the soundtrack of the grief and the love that Britchaps/chapesses are unable to express.They licence the evoking of powerful feelings in a reserved and semi-formal context.
I'd sooner give up red wine than buy a Celine Dion CD, but in this context I say: "Brava, Celine!" Hit it, kid. Not a dry eye in the house - you've done your job.
But. Many a British funeral is for, or is organised by, men who don't like to talk much about their feelings. There are often comments about how he loved banter and leg-pulling, how dry his sense of humour was, how his children knew he loved them even though he didn't tell them often. (Or ever....)
That's how these chaps are, or how they were. We celebrants serve them, we don't criticise or judge, I hope.
Enter Miss Dion (or Houston, or Carey.) Enter Andrea Bocelli duetting with Dion or Brightman. Enter the big throbbing ballad, the singers for whom "I" must be delivered as "HI.."
If pop music is the soundtrack of our lives, these belters are the soundtrack of the grief and the love that Britchaps/chapesses are unable to express.They licence the evoking of powerful feelings in a reserved and semi-formal context.
I'd sooner give up red wine than buy a Celine Dion CD, but in this context I say: "Brava, Celine!" Hit it, kid. Not a dry eye in the house - you've done your job.
Thursday, 1 January 2015
Language Follies and a HNY
First off: A Happy 2015 to my reader, and thanks for stopping by.
Wouldn't it be good if we could clear away some linguistic clutter in 2015? I don't mean the simply daft stuff, I mean the misleading phrases and euphemisms. Here's a few:
Future-proof. On the cover of "Broadleaf," the Woodland Trust magazine, I read "Future-proof: building a blueprint for the woods of tomorrow." Well-meaning, successful organisation - it doesn't need to write such bollocks. (Apart from any other consideration, a blueprint is a drawing, from which you create a building. You don't need to build a blueprint...)
The idea that we can proof anything, especially the natural environment, against future changes is foolishly misleading.
An ex-Snowdonia National Park environmental officer made it clear to me that the natural environment never keeps still. Conservation doesn't flash-freeze things as they happen to be at that moment. We can of course protect our woodland, in the here and now.
The reason why I think this nonsense is misleading is because if we cannot accept, indeed live in and with, the understanding that everything is always changing, we stand no chance of leading sane and rewarding lives. The more we cling, the faster we will perceive "it" as changing and the more panicky we will feel, whatever "it" might be. "It" will flow away from us even more quickly. The phrase "future proof" comes, I think, from the computer industry. "nuff said. Let's bin it.
Saving the planet. Whatever we do, the planet will be fine, rolling on through space for billions more years, unless there is a truly vast collision with something much bigger than it.
We won't necessarily be fine at all. Hubris doesn't help. We need to live with natural systems, degrade our support environment less, and so on, if we are to save our civilization, and ultimately the species, from premature wipe-out. But saving or destroying the planet is beyond us. Even a nuclear war wouldn't destroy it. It would simply destroy us, and very many other life forms. We need to keep our actions in sharp focus, within the limits of what we can do, if our civilization in to thrive and continue, until - ha! You can't, ultimately, future-proof our ways of life.
Wouldn't it be good if we could clear away some linguistic clutter in 2015? I don't mean the simply daft stuff, I mean the misleading phrases and euphemisms. Here's a few:
Future-proof. On the cover of "Broadleaf," the Woodland Trust magazine, I read "Future-proof: building a blueprint for the woods of tomorrow." Well-meaning, successful organisation - it doesn't need to write such bollocks. (Apart from any other consideration, a blueprint is a drawing, from which you create a building. You don't need to build a blueprint...)
The idea that we can proof anything, especially the natural environment, against future changes is foolishly misleading.
An ex-Snowdonia National Park environmental officer made it clear to me that the natural environment never keeps still. Conservation doesn't flash-freeze things as they happen to be at that moment. We can of course protect our woodland, in the here and now.
The reason why I think this nonsense is misleading is because if we cannot accept, indeed live in and with, the understanding that everything is always changing, we stand no chance of leading sane and rewarding lives. The more we cling, the faster we will perceive "it" as changing and the more panicky we will feel, whatever "it" might be. "It" will flow away from us even more quickly. The phrase "future proof" comes, I think, from the computer industry. "nuff said. Let's bin it.
Saving the planet. Whatever we do, the planet will be fine, rolling on through space for billions more years, unless there is a truly vast collision with something much bigger than it.
We won't necessarily be fine at all. Hubris doesn't help. We need to live with natural systems, degrade our support environment less, and so on, if we are to save our civilization, and ultimately the species, from premature wipe-out. But saving or destroying the planet is beyond us. Even a nuclear war wouldn't destroy it. It would simply destroy us, and very many other life forms. We need to keep our actions in sharp focus, within the limits of what we can do, if our civilization in to thrive and continue, until - ha! You can't, ultimately, future-proof our ways of life.
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
"We never keep to the present," said Pascal
I can't remember a better description of the destructiveness of ignoring the present moment than this:
"We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight.
We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of time that are not and blindly flee the only one that is.
The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away.
We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.
The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so."
Written a long time ago by someone who I doubt ever heard the term "mindfulness."
With thanks to Sarah for chasing down the whole passage, quoted to us during an excellent day with John Peacock.
"We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight.
We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of time that are not and blindly flee the only one that is.
The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away.
We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future.
The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so."
Written a long time ago by someone who I doubt ever heard the term "mindfulness."
With thanks to Sarah for chasing down the whole passage, quoted to us during an excellent day with John Peacock.
Wednesday, 3 December 2014
Digital cloning - mortality awareness, artificial intelligence and the end of the world?
This remarkable human being:
has warned us that artificial intelligence (computer power equal to the human brain) could threaten the survival of homo sapiens. He's a smart bloke and we'd do well to listen and think, though another prof calmed us a bit by saying that it's a 100+ years threat, not an "AI and Ebola too, which to tackle first?" sort of threat.
One aspect of AI which I find immediately worrying is the idea of a computer cloned with a digital facsimile of a person. I think it's worrying not because Apple might include it in their next upgrade, but because of what it tells us about mortality unawareness.
So I'm someone who has lost a partner in mid-life. I set up a digital clone of my beloved. This clone talks to me as he did, answers questions, chats, the whole bit. Maybe the imagery of him is avatar-like, or better.
So instead of mourning my beloved, I spend a lot of my time with "him." Instead of grieving for him, enduring pain, moving onwards, I stick in a digital version of the past. Not, note, my memories, but an updateable mock-up of him. If I meet someone else, after a decent time interval (I'll check with the kids - they'll tell me) what do I do? Ask my cloned beloved if that's OK? Compare digital nonperson with actual bloke I've met?
YUCK!
I'm avoiding the pain as well as the joy of being human. I'm pretending death doesn't exist. Don't tell me death and life are the same thing, and we need death to be alive. I'll stay enmeshed with my dead person, who can now talk to me, offer comfort, be soothing and.....
What a horrible temptation for a grief-stricken person.
But my dead dear one belongs here:
and in my heart. Not here:
AAAARGH!
(Or is it just me?)
has warned us that artificial intelligence (computer power equal to the human brain) could threaten the survival of homo sapiens. He's a smart bloke and we'd do well to listen and think, though another prof calmed us a bit by saying that it's a 100+ years threat, not an "AI and Ebola too, which to tackle first?" sort of threat.
One aspect of AI which I find immediately worrying is the idea of a computer cloned with a digital facsimile of a person. I think it's worrying not because Apple might include it in their next upgrade, but because of what it tells us about mortality unawareness.
So I'm someone who has lost a partner in mid-life. I set up a digital clone of my beloved. This clone talks to me as he did, answers questions, chats, the whole bit. Maybe the imagery of him is avatar-like, or better.
So instead of mourning my beloved, I spend a lot of my time with "him." Instead of grieving for him, enduring pain, moving onwards, I stick in a digital version of the past. Not, note, my memories, but an updateable mock-up of him. If I meet someone else, after a decent time interval (I'll check with the kids - they'll tell me) what do I do? Ask my cloned beloved if that's OK? Compare digital nonperson with actual bloke I've met?
YUCK!
I'm avoiding the pain as well as the joy of being human. I'm pretending death doesn't exist. Don't tell me death and life are the same thing, and we need death to be alive. I'll stay enmeshed with my dead person, who can now talk to me, offer comfort, be soothing and.....
What a horrible temptation for a grief-stricken person.
But my dead dear one belongs here:
and in my heart. Not here:
AAAARGH!
(Or is it just me?)
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Mortality: if you're mortal, this book should help. If you think you're not mortal, seek help....
This man (surgeon, researcher, teacher)
Atul Gawande, has written a really important book. "Being Mortal" pulls together a lot of what many people have been saying for quite a long time: late and drastic medical interventions in someone's last days can be dreadful failures, in terms of what the dying person has to go through. He says a lot more than that, and he bases what he has to say on detailed accounts, including the last weeks of friends, and of his own father.
It's not always a jolly read; he goes into detail on the sort of ailments that are likely to afflict most of us as we age. One of his aims is to make us think and prepare for future difficulties, ours and those close to us; he wants to change how we view - or try to avoid viewing - the last stages of life.
The book is about much more than medicine. He finds ways round the usual terrifying conundrums of the terminally ill, with regard to possible treatments. In doing so, he re-defines the role of doctors in such times.
Because a hospice nurse had sat down with Atul and his father and had a direct, careful sort of conversation, his father was able to surprise himself and his son with what he could still do.
"I was almosty oversome just witnessing it. Here was what a different kind of care - a different kind of medicine - makes possible, I thought to myself. Here is what having a hard conversation can do."
The conversation isn't about a menu of marginally effective and deeply horrible treatments; it's about asking the patient what matters to him, what are his fears, what is non-negotiable - all questions that acknowledge that he is going to die, and fairly soon. And then making the medicine serve those ends.
It is very hard for doctors to do the best for a dying person if the person and those close to him can't acknowledge that they are in the last days, or weeks, or months of a life
It's easy to say that the quality of a life is more important that it's length, at the end - unless, of course, it's your life. Here is a sensitive, emotionally honest, well-informed guide to a way through and round the horrors of futile (and very expensive) treatments.
He writes with compassion and clarity, and he wears his learning lightly. It's a very, very good book about dying, so it's also about living.
Contemplating, through this book, the end of life has made my immediate life richer. Can't say fairer than that!
Atul Gawande is giving this year's Reith lectures, BBC Radio 4, 09:00 next Tuesday 25th November. Should be good.
Atul Gawande, has written a really important book. "Being Mortal" pulls together a lot of what many people have been saying for quite a long time: late and drastic medical interventions in someone's last days can be dreadful failures, in terms of what the dying person has to go through. He says a lot more than that, and he bases what he has to say on detailed accounts, including the last weeks of friends, and of his own father.
It's not always a jolly read; he goes into detail on the sort of ailments that are likely to afflict most of us as we age. One of his aims is to make us think and prepare for future difficulties, ours and those close to us; he wants to change how we view - or try to avoid viewing - the last stages of life.
The book is about much more than medicine. He finds ways round the usual terrifying conundrums of the terminally ill, with regard to possible treatments. In doing so, he re-defines the role of doctors in such times.
Because a hospice nurse had sat down with Atul and his father and had a direct, careful sort of conversation, his father was able to surprise himself and his son with what he could still do.
"I was almosty oversome just witnessing it. Here was what a different kind of care - a different kind of medicine - makes possible, I thought to myself. Here is what having a hard conversation can do."
The conversation isn't about a menu of marginally effective and deeply horrible treatments; it's about asking the patient what matters to him, what are his fears, what is non-negotiable - all questions that acknowledge that he is going to die, and fairly soon. And then making the medicine serve those ends.
It is very hard for doctors to do the best for a dying person if the person and those close to him can't acknowledge that they are in the last days, or weeks, or months of a life
It's easy to say that the quality of a life is more important that it's length, at the end - unless, of course, it's your life. Here is a sensitive, emotionally honest, well-informed guide to a way through and round the horrors of futile (and very expensive) treatments.
He writes with compassion and clarity, and he wears his learning lightly. It's a very, very good book about dying, so it's also about living.
Contemplating, through this book, the end of life has made my immediate life richer. Can't say fairer than that!
Atul Gawande is giving this year's Reith lectures, BBC Radio 4, 09:00 next Tuesday 25th November. Should be good.
Monday, 10 November 2014
Funerals: Give them what they want?
This is a "funerals" post, so if you'd like to side-step it, that's fine by me, though Andrew Marr's BBC Radio 4 programme this morning made it pretty clear that thinking about death - yours - from time to time is a positive thing to do for your life.
Anyway: as a funeral celebrant, I spend much time ensuring people - families, friends, mourners - get what they want. That is surely a large part of the rationale for a ceremony that does not need to follow the rituals and structures of an organised religion (for better or worse, of course. Come on, own up - which of us does not have a bit of an aching hole where the finer elements of those rituals used to live? Whatever we believe?)
So a while ago, that's what I did. He who had died was a big character, the crematorium was packed twice over. His family wanted to accentuate the positive, celebrate the life, didn't want it too sad and gloomy.
After my customary warning that it would be sad, but that we would make sure it wasn't too sombre or gloomy, we went ahead and planned it.
It wasn't very sad, that's for sure.
The gathering loved it. Plenty of smiles, some big laughs. Off we went.
And I'm left thinking "was that "right?" There wasn't much mourning there, not much room for grief. Very few signs of grief. Not much acceptance or acknowledgement of the power and mystery of death to enrich our lives and help their grieving. And yet he was a greatly valued man.
Was I helping them to avoid the issue, skate in a superficial way over what had happened to them?
Maybe I still have a model of what a funeral "should" be, instead of letting it be what it is. I was pleased by how it went, but troubled by the thought that it may have lacked what many people see asone important function of a funeral - to help people through a physical loss, however much they want to enjoy memories of his life.
They got what they wanted, but probably not what what I wanted for them. I'm sure that's better than the other way round, but still...
-->
Anyway: as a funeral celebrant, I spend much time ensuring people - families, friends, mourners - get what they want. That is surely a large part of the rationale for a ceremony that does not need to follow the rituals and structures of an organised religion (for better or worse, of course. Come on, own up - which of us does not have a bit of an aching hole where the finer elements of those rituals used to live? Whatever we believe?)
So a while ago, that's what I did. He who had died was a big character, the crematorium was packed twice over. His family wanted to accentuate the positive, celebrate the life, didn't want it too sad and gloomy.
After my customary warning that it would be sad, but that we would make sure it wasn't too sombre or gloomy, we went ahead and planned it.
It wasn't very sad, that's for sure.
The gathering loved it. Plenty of smiles, some big laughs. Off we went.
And I'm left thinking "was that "right?" There wasn't much mourning there, not much room for grief. Very few signs of grief. Not much acceptance or acknowledgement of the power and mystery of death to enrich our lives and help their grieving. And yet he was a greatly valued man.
Was I helping them to avoid the issue, skate in a superficial way over what had happened to them?
Maybe I still have a model of what a funeral "should" be, instead of letting it be what it is. I was pleased by how it went, but troubled by the thought that it may have lacked what many people see asone important function of a funeral - to help people through a physical loss, however much they want to enjoy memories of his life.
They got what they wanted, but probably not what what I wanted for them. I'm sure that's better than the other way round, but still...
-->
Codicil
Hang about Vicar, let me interrupt.
Having been full of life you say, I'd want a party.
Yes, but I'm full of death now and see things differently.
You say I wouldn't have wanted folk to grieve for long.
No - but with infinite death ahead of me,
a few months being alive and fed up
doesn't seem much to ask of my friends.
OK, some of you wear the bright clothes I admired -
but you lot with less taste, give us a break
and wear dark colours please.
No flowers? Donations only? Hold your horses.
I could never have picked one charity
and loved buying and looking at flowers. I'd like to give
my mourners that opportunity.
True I liked food, and would like to see most of you
tucking in. But I'd also like to do some good -
and some of you who could do to lose a pound or two
should surely be too upset to eat.
Smile by all means, remember my gaffes
and share a careful laugh -
but then it's my funeral, fuck it -
some of you ought to go home and WEEP BUCKETS.
Julie Deakin
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
Harmony, and that Stephen Taberner live magic.
Singing as well as you can, with a goodly number of other non-professional singers who were almost all strangers until the previous morning; singing a simple but powerful little song in the mighty caverns of Liverpool Cathedral; now that's a mindful activity.
Life-enhancing, nothing to do with the trappings of funerals - it was a lovely change and maybe even a wee bit transformational.
Harmony seems to me to have the power to carry the beauties and pains of life, to accommodate both being alive and acknowledging life's transience. Perhaps that's why it fills people up. (Well, me, anyway!)
Your cursor over the title will take you to a YouTube clip of "Soyewela," a South African (Xhosa) freedom song. Four other songs from the same performance are also on YouTube. The most ambitious is Stephen's arrangement of an Australian rock anthem "Throw Your Arms Around Me," by Hunters and Collectors. It's not perfect, but it sure is live. Before we went on, Stephen advised not to worry about ourselves, just to let the song be. It's hard to describe that feeling, but it is very presentmoment, very communal, deeply refeshing.
The man is a magician, no question.
Life-enhancing, nothing to do with the trappings of funerals - it was a lovely change and maybe even a wee bit transformational.
Harmony seems to me to have the power to carry the beauties and pains of life, to accommodate both being alive and acknowledging life's transience. Perhaps that's why it fills people up. (Well, me, anyway!)
Your cursor over the title will take you to a YouTube clip of "Soyewela," a South African (Xhosa) freedom song. Four other songs from the same performance are also on YouTube. The most ambitious is Stephen's arrangement of an Australian rock anthem "Throw Your Arms Around Me," by Hunters and Collectors. It's not perfect, but it sure is live. Before we went on, Stephen advised not to worry about ourselves, just to let the song be. It's hard to describe that feeling, but it is very presentmoment, very communal, deeply refeshing.
The man is a magician, no question.
Sunday, 12 October 2014
Dying with dignity, funerals with dignity, depend on uniqueness
Your cursor over the title will take you to a BBC "Points of View" transcript of today's broadcast. Don't be misled by the title, it's not part of the assisted dying debate, it's simply about how difficult it is to feel that someone is dying with dignity.
To summarise clumsily: it's difficult for hospital staff, however compassionate and caring they may be, to provide in the environment of a modern hospital, that sense of a unique event happening to one individual. I'll leave you to read the whole thing.
Hospital staff do their best, some do extraordinarily well. But the bed in which she is dying is a bed amongst many; her death is one in a progression of deaths; and perhaps, somewhere in the hospital, someone is looking at spare beds, incoming patients, and thinking, with however much compassion that can be brought to bear, "the lady in no. 20 probably won't last the night, so..."
If you die at home, no-one is going to be waiting for your bed to be ill or die in. (Unless your family is exceptionally unlucky!) There may be one of those wonderful Macmillan people there to help, or someone from Hospice at Home. Hopefully, there will be close relatives there too (as there may well be in a hospital, of course.) But it's a unique event; it's your bed, and you're dying in it.
So if a dignified death depends on a sense of uniqueness, that is surely just as true at a funeral. That's why families hate it when there is another family visibly and sometimes audibly waiting for their turn; when an FD behaves as though this is just another job; when a celebrant minister or priest is doing so many funerals that he hasn't really made himself part of this family's feelings, hasn't done more or other than what he usually does.
The deathly production line. We must do better.
Of course, if you die in one of the hellish killing fields in the Middle East, or Africa, or... then all this is pretty marginal. We are a fortunate culture still. But I can't imagine there's any bereaved family anywhere that doesn't want, somehow, to feel that the uniqueness of the person they loved has been part of the death, the funeral and the grieving.
To summarise clumsily: it's difficult for hospital staff, however compassionate and caring they may be, to provide in the environment of a modern hospital, that sense of a unique event happening to one individual. I'll leave you to read the whole thing.
Hospital staff do their best, some do extraordinarily well. But the bed in which she is dying is a bed amongst many; her death is one in a progression of deaths; and perhaps, somewhere in the hospital, someone is looking at spare beds, incoming patients, and thinking, with however much compassion that can be brought to bear, "the lady in no. 20 probably won't last the night, so..."
If you die at home, no-one is going to be waiting for your bed to be ill or die in. (Unless your family is exceptionally unlucky!) There may be one of those wonderful Macmillan people there to help, or someone from Hospice at Home. Hopefully, there will be close relatives there too (as there may well be in a hospital, of course.) But it's a unique event; it's your bed, and you're dying in it.
So if a dignified death depends on a sense of uniqueness, that is surely just as true at a funeral. That's why families hate it when there is another family visibly and sometimes audibly waiting for their turn; when an FD behaves as though this is just another job; when a celebrant minister or priest is doing so many funerals that he hasn't really made himself part of this family's feelings, hasn't done more or other than what he usually does.
The deathly production line. We must do better.
Of course, if you die in one of the hellish killing fields in the Middle East, or Africa, or... then all this is pretty marginal. We are a fortunate culture still. But I can't imagine there's any bereaved family anywhere that doesn't want, somehow, to feel that the uniqueness of the person they loved has been part of the death, the funeral and the grieving.
Friday, 10 October 2014
we are pluralities - meditation and the striving ego
It seems to me that we are not single
entities, but pluralities, full of the voices and gestures of people we
have known, the places we have lived, and then some. We are unfolding
processes, and our present moment, our “now,” is arrived at from “them”
and “then” and “there.”
During meditation, it is possible, even for an inconsistent lightweight of a meditator like me, to let go of the trains of thought that usually occupy the mind, and be in the present moment; to drop concepts and judgements, and just be. It doesn't last long before the scripts start running again, and I need to bring the mind back again to the present - often to the breath.
This to and fro motion is, of course, what a meditation is, for most of us. The Balance is never static, as a tightrope walker might tell us.
For those moments of presentness, them then and there fall away. When I return to my plural self, it is with more calmness and a better balance. Perhaps for a while I am more fully a plurality, and happy with it; I am not struggling so much to sustain one single "I," worrying about claiming things for my ego. It's easier then to accept change, uncertainty, provisionality.
Meditation, like exercise, can be addictive!
During meditation, it is possible, even for an inconsistent lightweight of a meditator like me, to let go of the trains of thought that usually occupy the mind, and be in the present moment; to drop concepts and judgements, and just be. It doesn't last long before the scripts start running again, and I need to bring the mind back again to the present - often to the breath.
This to and fro motion is, of course, what a meditation is, for most of us. The Balance is never static, as a tightrope walker might tell us.
For those moments of presentness, them then and there fall away. When I return to my plural self, it is with more calmness and a better balance. Perhaps for a while I am more fully a plurality, and happy with it; I am not struggling so much to sustain one single "I," worrying about claiming things for my ego. It's easier then to accept change, uncertainty, provisionality.
Meditation, like exercise, can be addictive!
Monday, 6 October 2014
Serenade - a poem by John Fuller
This poem links in my mind with my post about the fear of death, 02:10:14; I hope Mr Fuller doesn't mind my reprinting in full his fine poem, which I found in The Spectator, 4th October 2014, page 24.
Come to the garden, that familiar place
Where life renews itself against all odds.
Untightening buds act out their memory,
And dying seems a momentray pause.
Our star that took an afternoon to sink
Hangs in reluctance from the darkening tree
Like an amused and philosophic eye
Penning his treatise of the out-of-doors.
We are the topics of his arguments,
Enduring his extemporised revisions.
We are reminded of our natural ends
And of our origins and of their laws.
The knotted plum has dared at last to bloom:
Its blossom has no other mind but yours.
The yellow spray will lean down just for you
And though its petals scatter, they are yours.
Twisted wistaria unfolds and falls:
Its violet is a passing thought of yours.
The carved magnolia tilts its head and lifts a cheek
That mimics the expressiveness of yours.
The visited and swooning clematis
Climbs like a conscious eagerness of yours.
Yours are the flowers dimmer than their air,
Whose perfume lingers like an old desire.
Come to the garden, where two glasses wait
And there's a chair beside another chair.
The liquid lifts and widens as it pours,
And evening has no other end but night.
John Fuller
Come to the garden, that familiar place
Where life renews itself against all odds.
Untightening buds act out their memory,
And dying seems a momentray pause.
Our star that took an afternoon to sink
Hangs in reluctance from the darkening tree
Like an amused and philosophic eye
Penning his treatise of the out-of-doors.
We are the topics of his arguments,
Enduring his extemporised revisions.
We are reminded of our natural ends
And of our origins and of their laws.
The knotted plum has dared at last to bloom:
Its blossom has no other mind but yours.
The yellow spray will lean down just for you
And though its petals scatter, they are yours.
Twisted wistaria unfolds and falls:
Its violet is a passing thought of yours.
The carved magnolia tilts its head and lifts a cheek
That mimics the expressiveness of yours.
The visited and swooning clematis
Climbs like a conscious eagerness of yours.
Yours are the flowers dimmer than their air,
Whose perfume lingers like an old desire.
Come to the garden, where two glasses wait
And there's a chair beside another chair.
The liquid lifts and widens as it pours,
And evening has no other end but night.
John Fuller
Sunday, 5 October 2014
The psychological appeal of polarised views: adolescence, The Process, jihadism - ?
I had two good friends at school who became heavily inolved in what became a full-blown cult. This cult, originally called The Process, and later the Process Church of the Final Judgement, was why I lost touch with them both. At one point, I was quite interested in The Process myself.
I realise now it was feeding on the common adolescent uncertainty about personal identity, and the longing to belong to Something - and of course in 1967 that Something had better be strange and exciting. It mustn't be part of what Processeans charmingly called "the Grey." (i.e. you and me.)
Well, that was a long time ago. Here's something more recent; from "The Spectator," 4th October, page 17. It's a woman describing how her stepson became a radical Islamist, and how he is now beginning to return to his family, leaving behind the influence of his frightening friends:
"He is maturing. He no longer needs the support of a tribe, which is what attractes Muslims from all backgrounds and nations to the idea of jihad. I've come to think that it is youth, not presecution or poverty, that these Islamic State groupies have in common, an embryonic sense of identity. For them, blaming America for the world's problems is the equivalent of shouting at their parents that they 'never asked to be born.'"
I think that my young friends back then in the mid-1960s felt that at last they had an identity that had nothing to do with their parents, that simplified their lives, gave them a new identity and a tribe. Thus were they pulled into the vortex of The Process.
It provided absolute and polarised answers to the frustrating complexities of life, it broke down their previous sense of who they were and where they belonged, it made them vulnerable to manipulative people. And as usual with such cults, guess what? There was, allegedly (!), sex and money in it for the leaders.
Would that Western jihadists had fallen for something so ultimately ludicrous and relatively harmless as the Process Church, rather than the terrifying simplicities of jihadism. The Process had its nasty side, in my opinion, but it didn't involve hacking people's heads off and it had no power base in regional religious sectarian conflict.
So when desperate parents tell us that they can't understand why their middle-class privileged children start to talk in scary slogans and attack everything their family stands for, I think that, unlikely though it may at first seem, there may be something in common with my two schoolfriends, both from comfortable, apparently stable middle-class backgrounds.
They both became relatively suddenly alienated, energised, very strange, and figuratively and then literally, distanced from all they had known, all who knew them. They had a tribe. Than God it wasn't Charles Manson's tribe, or Jim Jones down in Guyana.
I realise now it was feeding on the common adolescent uncertainty about personal identity, and the longing to belong to Something - and of course in 1967 that Something had better be strange and exciting. It mustn't be part of what Processeans charmingly called "the Grey." (i.e. you and me.)
Well, that was a long time ago. Here's something more recent; from "The Spectator," 4th October, page 17. It's a woman describing how her stepson became a radical Islamist, and how he is now beginning to return to his family, leaving behind the influence of his frightening friends:
"He is maturing. He no longer needs the support of a tribe, which is what attractes Muslims from all backgrounds and nations to the idea of jihad. I've come to think that it is youth, not presecution or poverty, that these Islamic State groupies have in common, an embryonic sense of identity. For them, blaming America for the world's problems is the equivalent of shouting at their parents that they 'never asked to be born.'"
I think that my young friends back then in the mid-1960s felt that at last they had an identity that had nothing to do with their parents, that simplified their lives, gave them a new identity and a tribe. Thus were they pulled into the vortex of The Process.
It provided absolute and polarised answers to the frustrating complexities of life, it broke down their previous sense of who they were and where they belonged, it made them vulnerable to manipulative people. And as usual with such cults, guess what? There was, allegedly (!), sex and money in it for the leaders.
Would that Western jihadists had fallen for something so ultimately ludicrous and relatively harmless as the Process Church, rather than the terrifying simplicities of jihadism. The Process had its nasty side, in my opinion, but it didn't involve hacking people's heads off and it had no power base in regional religious sectarian conflict.
So when desperate parents tell us that they can't understand why their middle-class privileged children start to talk in scary slogans and attack everything their family stands for, I think that, unlikely though it may at first seem, there may be something in common with my two schoolfriends, both from comfortable, apparently stable middle-class backgrounds.
They both became relatively suddenly alienated, energised, very strange, and figuratively and then literally, distanced from all they had known, all who knew them. They had a tribe. Than God it wasn't Charles Manson's tribe, or Jim Jones down in Guyana.
Thursday, 2 October 2014
The Fear of Death - mindsets that might help.
I don't mean the natural (biologically-wired) drive to avoid death. Neither do I mean fears about the nature of our individual exits. I mean the sort of out-of-balance existential terror that some people feel deep down about the fact that
(plot spoiler alert...)
everyone dies.
"What, me? Now? But...but...but...
It seems to me natural to have some fear of death; one philosophical response is that of Epicurus: "where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not."
So the state of being dead should have no fears for us. But then Epicurus was evidently brilliant, with a strong mind, and he didn't seem to trouble himself about the ending of his consciousness, his personality, in death. What might help us lesser beings?
I have a friend whose practice is to be as close as possible to nature, all of it, natural forces, seasons, plants, animals. Not as in "oh what a lovely view," nature as a pretty backdrop.
More like Dylan Thomas' "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ is my destroyer./ And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/ I am bent by the same wintry fever." This helps her to see her own life and death as part of huge natural cycles, which may not ultimately be eternal but are as close to it as we can imagine.
Another friend thinks we should make more of ancestors; our current egotiscal rage to "individualise" everything reinforces the view that we are alone and unique in time. Perhaps if we could see that we came from our forebears and pass on what we were to those who come after, we could feel readier to let go, to feel part of a pattern.
Yet another friend believes the ancestors are Right There with us. I don't, in any literal sense, but I can see the point.
I think many of us probably need something to help us relinquish our lives with the feeling that we are part of a pattern, a process, a reality greater than ourselves. There are those who say, again, along with Epicurus, "I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care." I haven't come across many who truly feel that.
I don't know if believing you have an eternal soul helps you to fear death less. I would guess that for some it does, and for some it doesn't.
I hope, whatever you believe or think you know, that you find some way of reducing you own fear of death, because excessive death-fear can really mess your life up. Happily, it can be treated (see the excellent "Staring At The Sun," by Irving D Yalom.)
(plot spoiler alert...)
everyone dies.
"What, me? Now? But...but...but...
It seems to me natural to have some fear of death; one philosophical response is that of Epicurus: "where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not."
So the state of being dead should have no fears for us. But then Epicurus was evidently brilliant, with a strong mind, and he didn't seem to trouble himself about the ending of his consciousness, his personality, in death. What might help us lesser beings?
I have a friend whose practice is to be as close as possible to nature, all of it, natural forces, seasons, plants, animals. Not as in "oh what a lovely view," nature as a pretty backdrop.
More like Dylan Thomas' "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ is my destroyer./ And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/ I am bent by the same wintry fever." This helps her to see her own life and death as part of huge natural cycles, which may not ultimately be eternal but are as close to it as we can imagine.
Another friend thinks we should make more of ancestors; our current egotiscal rage to "individualise" everything reinforces the view that we are alone and unique in time. Perhaps if we could see that we came from our forebears and pass on what we were to those who come after, we could feel readier to let go, to feel part of a pattern.
Yet another friend believes the ancestors are Right There with us. I don't, in any literal sense, but I can see the point.
I think many of us probably need something to help us relinquish our lives with the feeling that we are part of a pattern, a process, a reality greater than ourselves. There are those who say, again, along with Epicurus, "I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care." I haven't come across many who truly feel that.
I don't know if believing you have an eternal soul helps you to fear death less. I would guess that for some it does, and for some it doesn't.
I hope, whatever you believe or think you know, that you find some way of reducing you own fear of death, because excessive death-fear can really mess your life up. Happily, it can be treated (see the excellent "Staring At The Sun," by Irving D Yalom.)
Saturday, 27 September 2014
Mindfulness and depression: Anthony's wisdom and courage
If you hover your cursor over the title above, it will take you to a blog post that is a bulletin from the front line of using mindfulness to help with clinical depression.
Anthony's honesty and insightfulness need no further words from me.
Anthony's honesty and insightfulness need no further words from me.
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
They shall not grow old" - the British Legion is mis-using these words.
This excerpt form Lawrence Binyon's poem "For the Fallen" is frequently used at the funerals of soldiers, and at memorial ceremonies for them such as Armistice Day:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
The poem is called "For the Fallen," i.e. for those who die in battle.
These words, followed by the Last Post bugle call, are profoundly moving when uttered at the funeral of a soldier who has died in action, or on active service. It is not to glorify war to observe that these simple lines have rung eloquently and painfully true to generations of English-speaking people around the world.
However, the British Legion uses them in the funerals of old soldiers. A while ago I attended one such funeral. As a national serviceman he had fought bravely in one of the small but nasty wars during the twilight of the British Empire. He died in his mid seventies, over fifty years after his military service.
It abrurptly dawned on me that the first two lines of the Exhortation, as the Legion calls it, were wildly inappropriate for this man. He had, I'm pleased to say, grown old; he had survived the patrols and ambushes of his youth, raised a family, enjoyed the rest of his life. Age had wearied him, in the way that it wearies anyone who lives out a reasonably full life-span.
The last two lines, "At the going down of the sun..." were entirely appropriate, and could be used at anyone's funeral, especially if you subsitute "him" or "her" for "them."
It's about time the British Legion stopped mis-using these words; the worst thing that could happen to them is over-familiarity. We need these words in the full form, for the dreadful day when a family has to say goodbye to a young man or woman who will not grow old.
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
GET RID of us professional funeralists.
If you let your cursor hover flirtatiously over the title above, it will take you to a BBC website article about printed houses, for people to live in on Mars and the moon (uhuh. Why? What's the point? Enlighten me someone please...) It then goes on, much more interestingly, to computer-printed houses right here on earth. Houses built at a fraction of the costs and the time of your standard housing estate box.
The article mentions the hostility of some architects, who claim it debases their professional skills. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - Frank Lloyd Wright is a design hero now, but he wasn't always, and as for Le Corbusier...And there are those of us who marvel that the National Theatre must surely have been designed and built by a robot, or a very angry person. Opposition to printed houses via aesthetic arguments would need some careful thought. How lovely a sight is a contemporary suburban housing estate?
Construction firms will no doubt also be pretty hostile. It would be a huge upheaval.
What's this got to do with funerals, Gloria? I can hear you ask. (I hope...)
If computer-printed houses dispense with most of the skills and labours of professionals, then a truly co-operative, community model for living with the end of life would get rid of most of the paid work of celebrants and undertakers.
BRAVO!
Just to repeat it again: a community (adjoining villages, small town, city district) has in it people who would occasionally give their skills to supporting people who are dying; to caring for their bodies when they are dead; to carrying out a funeral ceremony, and to supporting the bereaved. They wouldn't expect payments, except sometimes - for expenses involved in body care, for example. This would build community relationships (deaths bring people together) and save people a hell of a lot of money.
Never mind (for the moment) the Scottish referendum; devolve funerals to the community, not the governing elite of undertakers and celebrants.
GET RID OF US! (mostly.)
I would work locally for expenses only, if I were helping with ten funerals a year instead of fifty, if I were helping to organise and co-ordinate something people were doing themselves, saying what they want to say, doing what they want to do, and holding that ceremony where they wanted.
DOWN with gruesome crematorium chapels, neo-Gothic "chapels of rest," rushed half-hour ceremonies.
ALL POWER to the dead and the bereaved.
The article mentions the hostility of some architects, who claim it debases their professional skills. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - Frank Lloyd Wright is a design hero now, but he wasn't always, and as for Le Corbusier...And there are those of us who marvel that the National Theatre must surely have been designed and built by a robot, or a very angry person. Opposition to printed houses via aesthetic arguments would need some careful thought. How lovely a sight is a contemporary suburban housing estate?
Construction firms will no doubt also be pretty hostile. It would be a huge upheaval.
What's this got to do with funerals, Gloria? I can hear you ask. (I hope...)
If computer-printed houses dispense with most of the skills and labours of professionals, then a truly co-operative, community model for living with the end of life would get rid of most of the paid work of celebrants and undertakers.
BRAVO!
Just to repeat it again: a community (adjoining villages, small town, city district) has in it people who would occasionally give their skills to supporting people who are dying; to caring for their bodies when they are dead; to carrying out a funeral ceremony, and to supporting the bereaved. They wouldn't expect payments, except sometimes - for expenses involved in body care, for example. This would build community relationships (deaths bring people together) and save people a hell of a lot of money.
Never mind (for the moment) the Scottish referendum; devolve funerals to the community, not the governing elite of undertakers and celebrants.
GET RID OF US! (mostly.)
I would work locally for expenses only, if I were helping with ten funerals a year instead of fifty, if I were helping to organise and co-ordinate something people were doing themselves, saying what they want to say, doing what they want to do, and holding that ceremony where they wanted.
DOWN with gruesome crematorium chapels, neo-Gothic "chapels of rest," rushed half-hour ceremonies.
ALL POWER to the dead and the bereaved.
Monday, 15 September 2014
Denial vs consolation, depression vs mourning, funeral poems
Edward Hirsch lost his son Gabriel in 2011, and recently published a long eponymous poem about Gabriel's life and his death.
In the interview I mentioned in my previous post, he says:
“I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. There is a big difference between depression and mourning. Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause. Many of us are carrying the dead around with us. We should not feel ashamed of that.”
I'm sure the second sentence carries a sombre truth for our culture and our times.
He also says that what he wrote about elegy in "A Poet's Glossary" would be less about consolation, had he written it after his son's death.
I sometimes wonder if I try too hard to find consoling words for funeral ceremonies; it seems to be what people want, they seem to find it helpful. Is it a fine line we walk between denying death and offering a consoling thought?
The last line of the much-used poem "Do Not Stand By My Grave And Weep" is: "I did not die."
To which Spike Milligan might have said "then what the hell are we all doing here dressed in suits?"
Brian Patten's "How Long Does A Man Live?" (out of Pablo Neruda, btw) I find a lot more substantial, with a much better balance.
It doesn't seek to deny the reality of a death, and the consolation it offers seems to me much more substantial.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
