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Begging for My Mother: Find A Grave and the Strangers Who Collect Our Dead

This morning I signed into Find A Grave to update my mother’s memorial and discovered that I no longer manage her page. No email warned me. Nothing in my account records the change. Six family memorials, five of them sponsored with my own money in the weeks after my mother died, and my name has been stripped from every one. The site that once made me beg for custody of my own dead has taken that custody back, in silence, and left me to discover the loss the way you discover a missing wallet: by reaching for something that should be there.

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What the Lemmings Could Not Do: On Suicide, Cognition, and the Mortal Imagination

Of all the acts a human being can perform, suicide is the strangest. It requires the actor to picture a world without itself, judge that world preferable, and execute a plan whose author will not survive to see the result. No other behavior in the human repertoire so cleanly inverts the survival logic that built every body and every brain. The question of whether other animals do the same thing is a question about cognition. The behavior is downstream of cognition, and beneath cognition runs the question of meaning. To kill oneself one must first have the kind of self that can be killed by its owner.

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Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

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Protesting Westboro Baptist Church Protesters at a Protest

When I was growing up, my parents would regularly remind me how lucky my brother and I were to live in a country where protest was as acceptable (and remains so) as it was — in Communist Romania, people marching the streets with signs jeering President Ceaucescu would have been arrested. People who marched down the street jeering then President Clinton would face no such problem as was evidenced by all the people calling for his resignation during the Lewinsky scandal that seemed to rock the United States for awhile.

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The Funeral

by Steve Gaines

1975

gray hair…
gray face…
still handsome
dead among the tears
and the small talk
and the prayers
sons and daughters…
progeny by the score
standing silently
uncomfortably
in the mortuary’s silence and sighs
in a loud corner two brothers talk
about corporate finance
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