Tag Archives: Death and Dying

Dignity to the End

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Last Saturday, we hosted a live streaming show by yours truly from the saloon in our house. It’s called the Double Deuce and I call these streamers, “Live From the Double Deuce.” Yeah. Real original. Don’t like it—name your own shows. Oh that’s right, you don’t have any. Okay, enough of being mean. Let’s all make America kind again. Oh, never mind. [lyrical reference]

My sister mentioned one of my songs I played, “Bobcaygeon,” by The Tragically Hip.

I’ve been a fan of the Hip since I drove up to Montreal with Mary and Mark to visit Canadian members of her extended family. Mark was probably eight or nine. We ended up going to an Expos game at the Olympic Stadium. Probably the Braves were in town. We went down to St. Catherine’s Street, part of the city’s shopping district. There was one of those classic department stores, Eaton’s. Eaton’s was a multi-story emporium that every large city had in the late 19th and through much of the 20th centuries. Of course, the big box phenomenon brought about their demise and Jeff Bezos and Amazon ended up finishing them off. Eaton’s officially shut its doors in 1999. Back in 1990, the store still maintained a vibrant buzz with its multiple floors of consumer goods including music. Of course, if all you know is scrolling through items on a small phone screen, you’ll never understand the art of tastefully arrayed items with a purpose, in an actual physical space: think retail Feng shui, or something similar. But that was the lure and wonder of places like Eaton’s.

The T. Eaton Co. Ltd. store in downtown Montreal

That visit is where I scored my initial piece of plastic ware from the hip. This being the 1990s, it came in cassette form and the title was Road Apples. I knew the band due to their song “New Orleans is Sinking” on Maine’s last freeform FM station, WTOS. I probably bought the tape on the strength of that one song (which isn’t on this recording, btw). Glad I did. I became a huge fan. Have been to this day.

Road Apples (1991) by The Tragically Hip

Phantom Power, the record that “Bobcaygeon” is on, is one of my favorite Hip records. I always liked that song and I learned it as one of my first five songs on my quest to master 10 songs so I’d have an actual setlist. I’ve blown past that self-imposed barrier. Continue reading →

No Imagination

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At some point, you simply give up on (some) people. I’m talking about the ones who regularly offer up the most perfunctory responses response to me (or Mary) when they learn about Mark’s story and how our 33-year-old son was killed. How many times am I going to have to hear “I can’t imagine”?

Americans are nothing if not superficial. If they are able to muster a shred of empathy and support during a tough patch, they rarely are capable of sustaining it for long. We’re a country where sliding glibly over the horrific and returning to our happy, positive thoughts is akin to taking a drug. Of course, speaking of drugs, there’s a pharmaceutical for everything, especially ones designed to numb any pain. Then, did you see this? Apparently, psychedelics are a thing again.

I never liked reading or hearing about the death of a son or daughter, preceding their parents. Being a father, I never had difficulty summoning empathy for them. I simply imagined how I’d likely feel if I ended up in their shoes. I’m wearing them now and it hurts worse than I imagined it would. Continue reading →

Richness follows Loss

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I know that not everyone who reads the blog is a writer, or aspires toward the writing life. However, over the past few weeks, a window of reflection has opened, looking backwards. What I’ve been able to see with uncommon clarity, has been much of the past decade or more for me. Writing has been at the center of this period of time, what I characterize as my personal period of reinvention.

Life dictates that we move on from grief and loss. Outside of the death of immediate family members—and even then, superficiality predominates how others respond, with platitudes, or worse—clearly demonstrating some sort of structural disconnect and a deep-rooted denial related to death and dying in our culture. “Get over it and move on” is what we’re expected to do.

Over the weekend, I went through some of Bryant’s books. A demonstration of grace from his son, when he offered me the opportunity to go through his father’s collection of books, at the funeral service. He followed up with an email and we spoke by phone during the week. I planned to meet him on Saturday at his father’s apartment in Augusta.

Bryant had taught at Colby-Sawyer, with Wes McNair. There were several of McNair’s books sitting on his bookshelves. Most of them ended up in the two overstocked boxes I lugged out of the apartment and put in my trunk. Continue reading →