Tag Archives: death

A Death in the Village

May 21, 2013 By in Urban Semiotic Tags: , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

On Janna’s way to work this morning, she snapped this image with her iPhone and emailed it to me.  She’s done that in the past with a copper moon, and a Steve Jobs memorial, but these flowers, and this mourning this morning was different.

This shrine was filled with hurt and rage and you can find it all right now at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the corner of West 8th Street and the Avenue of the Americas; for this is the spot where Mark Carson, a 32-year-old Gay man, was gunned down a few days ago — shot in the face by an impromptu stalker just for being who he was — and so the latest Greenwich Village New York City hate crime is now on the police blotter, written in blood on a public sidewalk.

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Möbius Strip Death Notifications at Sunnyside Manor

April 15, 2013 By in Dramatic Medicine Tags: , , , , , , , 16 Comments

The smell hung in the air so densely I felt like I could see it: a gray, sickly cloud that pervaded every hallway of the cheerily-named Sunnyside Manor. As I walked to the courtyard toward my Alzheimer’s-afflicted aunt, I couldn’t help the sense of dread building in my stomach. As she turned toward me, her eyes narrowed in confusion, then turned grimly polite.

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Thirty Years On Today: Burying Oliver Mark Wadey

February 17, 2013 By in Dramatic Medicine Tags: , , , , , , , 18 Comments

They say that time heals — I beg to differ. It may cloud and diminish generalities, but on this day, every year, the pain is still the pain that only the gut wrenching sorrow that the loss of a child can bring. True that pain is confined to this day and this day alone and in spite of all my efforts and strategies over the years to cope with it, deal with it, or even try to ignore it altogether, I never quite manage to do so.

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Living 200 Years and Knowing the Date of Your Death

February 6, 2013 By in Boles University Tags: , , , , , , , 41 Comments

If you had the choice to live to age 200, would you take up that blind offer?  My beloved wife Janna would not.  She’s perfectly content with her life and, if she died today, she would feel satisfied with the accomplishments of her life.  I, on the other hand, would love to live to age 200 if, of course, there were no sort of Twilight Zone curse involved where I was confined to a bed in a coma for 125 years, or I became a pack mule in the Himalayas for a century, or if I had to live in an active sewer and never see the light of day for 110 years.

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Being Fined for Poor Hiking Preparation

January 9, 2013 By in Urban Semiotic Tags: , , 2 Comments

Being ill prepared usually brings about it ill consequence, depending on what is being done — sometimes disastrous, even. There are not too many examples I have seen of people being fined by the police for being poorly prepared for something, however — until I came across an example of exactly this. A gentleman in Victoria made plans to go on a three day hike and only took the most paltry of provisions — potatoes and naan, to be exact.

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The Dead and the Scared: How Sandy Hook Stood Up to a Gunman

December 18, 2012 By in Boles University Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m not sure if there’s much more left to to say in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut that hasn’t already been shot to death before — except that it was excellent how, together, teachers and students faced down death that day — while our politicians will never be similarly brave because they are more terrified of the long and ugly shadow of the NRA than they are of dead children.

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At Night, I Get Scared

November 30, 2012 By in Go Inside Tags: , , , , 15 Comments

Today is the third day in a row I’m writing about the death of the great author and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, because I just can’t get his life out of my mind.  Every time we’d meet or speak on the phone, I would take copious notes because I didn’t want to forget anything he told me.

Every conversation was ripe and ready for memorialization in a blog post or in a future thinking endeavor.  Howard Stein was always teaching, and when you had his attention, you were the most important person in the world to him.  He was staunchly rational and fearless almost up to the end; and I say “almost” because during the last few months of his life, he confessed to me that, at night, he would get scared.

http://boles.com/called/12/scared.jpg

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Life is Loss: We are Our Deficits

November 29, 2012 By in WordPunk Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

As we continue to mourn the death of Dr. Howard Stein, we are left to ponder the joy of knowing him and, in missing him, we begin the healing process by remembering the important lessons he taught us.

One of the most poignant conversations I had with him in the last few weeks of his life dealt with age and growing older.  Howard reversed an important expectation for me, and I appreciate the reality of that sobering.

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When Suicide is Not Enough: Killing by Economic Deficit

October 3, 2012 By in RelationShaping Tags: , , , 6 Comments

We have been taught since childhood that self-harm and suicide are inappropriate and never the solution to any problem.  Yet, every year, many of us still decide to end our lives by our own hand.

Why?

Do we kill ourselves because of a lack of coping skills?  Do we raise our hand against our minds because we feel helpless and lost?  Does turning on the “Off Button” somehow lead to the easing of an inexpressible pain?

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Do Not Use Twitter to Threaten a School

August 8, 2012 By in Urban Semiotic Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Twitter has done a lot of things in the last six years since it launched from giving everyone the ability to tweet about their daily tinkle routines to social revolution, but the one thing that it seems to prove is that people do not seem to ever learn that if you put something out on Twitter it is not that different from yelling it from a rooftop.

For one, a good number of people have been outright fired or otherwise lost their jobs because of posts they have made on Twitter. I would never imagine anybody other than someone who didn’t care about their employment status going onto a rooftop to announce to the world that they were going to get a job that they hated but would get a big paycheck for it.

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Remembering MCA of the Beastie Boys

May 7, 2012 By in Boles Blues Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

The year was 1987, and I was sitting in the cafeteria of a hospital in Princeton having a snack while waiting for my mother to come down and tell me if there had been any update with the family member I had been visiting. Hospitals seemed to be a dark and gloomy place for me and I had a companion with me that brought me a bit of cheer in the form of a Walkman and a copy of the 1986 album Licensed to Ill on cassette. I loved looking at the cover of the tape and thinking about the circumstances that would cause a plane to crumple like that. I must have listened to that album half a dozen times when I was sitting in that hospital. Now I am sad to have learned that one of the founding members of The Beastie Boys, Adam Yauch (known as MCA), passed away on Friday at the age of 47, possibly related to the cancer he was treating since 2009.

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The Death of Levon Helm is the Beginning of the End of the Dylan Era

April 20, 2012 By in Boles Blues, Scientific Aesthetic Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

Levon Helm died yesterday in New York City of throat cancer. He was 71. Levon was a tremendous talent and an outstanding drummer. Few people understand the engine that drives any sort of live performance music is the rhythm — and in modern music, that means a live drummer. Without a proper human metronome keeping the entire band on track and in sync, the entire song falls apart. If you have a terrible drummer, the job of keeping the energy of the music moving forward falls to the bass player. If both drummer and bass player are inept, you do not have a band. Levon Helm was, The Band:

Helm, the drummer and singer who brought an urgent beat and a genuine Arkansas twang to some of The Band’s best-known songs and helped turn a bunch of musicians known mostly as Bob Dylan’s backup group into one of rock’s most legendary acts, has died. He was 71.

Helm, who was found to have throat cancer in 1998, died Thursday afternoon of complications from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said Lucy Sabini of Vanguard Records. On Tuesday, a message on his website said he was in the final stages of cancer.

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The Breitbart Blowback

March 2, 2012 By in WordPunk Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Radical blogger, and social infidel firestorm bomber, Andrew Breitbart, is dead at 43.  Watching the flow of internets reactions to his sudden death slowly roll into the virtual public square are telling in the portrait they create of a cunning and cruel man in life.  I won’t be shedding any tears for losing Breitbart.  I believe the divisive politics of hate will be less vicious without him knowingly and purposefully spewing predetermined lies at cultural touchstones for his sport and personal profiteering.

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Who Would Taunt a Dying Child? These People!

February 15, 2012 By in Dramatic Medicine, Urban Semiotic Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Proverbially speaking, it is never considered proper to kick a fellow when he is down — doing so in reality is even worse. Whether it comes in the form of ridiculing a person who is sleeping on the street or yelling cruel insults at a person in a wheelchair, it is simply not the proper way for one person to behave toward another.

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