Tag: Death

• Searching for the exit

  Dad is lying on his bed, half human and half ghost. He is not as pale as he was during his last bout with pneumonia, but he certainly looks ghost-like. His companion machine with its steady pulse is squirting oxygen into his nostrils with each breath. Dad is wearing pants in bed, a linen shirt […]

  Mark

  June 23, 2015

  Life 2015

  Death, Dying

• Dying well

  Dear old Dad is dying. It’s been an inference most of us have made based on his condition, which has been slowly but steadily worsening. Yesterday it became more explicit in his email to us. Dad’s left lung basically doesn’t work anymore. In his case it is due to a condition called pulmonary fibrosis. With […]

  Mark

  June 1, 2015

  Life 2015

  Death, Dying

• R.I.P. Arthur Belvedere Dent, 2003-2014

  He’s like the son I might have known If God had granted me a son. Valjean “Bring them home” From the musical Les Miserables Eight years to the day after we put our cat Sprite to sleep, today our cat Arthur also went to that great big clover patch in the sky as well. It’s […]

  Mark

  March 26, 2014

  Life 2014

  Death, Pets

• You’re dying. So what else is new?

  The inescapable implication of being alive is that you will die. Most of us accept our mortality in a kind of abstract way. We are aware of it but choose not to dwell on it. Fortunately, life offers us plenty of reasons to ignore it. For most of us, simply surviving is a full time […]

  Mark

  March 25, 2012

  Life 2012

  Death, Dying, Terminal Illnesses

• Thoughts on death and dying

  Should dying be scary? Should being dead be scary? It seems for most of us the gut answer to both questions is yes. There is a lot of money to be made feeding our fears and phobias around death and dying. The beauty industry depends on its ability to sell us on, if not on […]

  Mark

  March 13, 2011

  Sociology

  Death, Dying

• Death – much ado about nothing?

  There is nothing like a long three-week convalescence to focus your mind on the impermanence of all things. Our bodies are infinitely complex biological machines. They work with freaky regularity and excellence until one day when, of course, they do not. In my case, it stopped on January 14th when I had tarsal tunnel surgery […]

  Mark

  January 31, 2010

  Philosophy

  Death

• On the movable walkway called life

  As you may have noticed, one consequence of being born is that you eventually must die. It may seem unfair, but that’s just the way it is. We are all prisoners in our own unique time stream. We step onto our time stream (we assume) at birth, although some part of it begins at conception. […]

  Mark

  July 25, 2009

  Best of Occam’s Razor, Life 2009, Philosophy

  Death, Life, Space-Time

• A grave business

  Life is about living, right? So why spend any time at all planning for death? After all, there are few things more certain in life than death and taxes. Once you are dead, unless you are Jesus Christ, you can forget about coming back to life. The best use of my corpse will be pushing […]

  Mark

  March 19, 2009

  Life 2009, Sociology

  Death, Dying, Financial Planning

• Consciousness as a two-way mirror

  I haven’t written about metaphysics for quite a while, mainly because I did not have much to say. Principally, I was losing interest in the subject but also I have been busy engaging in life, which I suspect is its natural purpose. Yet, occasionally something comes up in the press on metaphysics that piques my […]

  Mark

  September 19, 2008

  Best of Occam’s Razor, Metaphysics

  Afterlife, Death, Quantum Physics, Soul

• Suicide’s devastation and odd harvest

  Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be the pains that are withheld for me I realize and I can see… that suicide is painless It brings on many changes and I can take or leave it if I please. From the movie M*A*S*H To me, suicide is one of these […]

  Mark

  November 22, 2007

  Sociology

  Death, Loss, Suicide