Grandfather Death Quotes

The field of battle is my temple. I mentally chant a saying my grandfather taught me the day he met me, when I was six. He insists it sharpens the mind the way a whetstone sharpens a blade. The swordpoint is my priest. The dance of death is my prayer. The killing blow is my release.

My grandfather used to say the placement of a birthmark was the story of how a person lost the battle in their past life. I guess you got stabbed in the neck. Bet it was a quick death, though.

I was scared to death of these chickens, but I tried not to let Ira know that.

I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad. And how I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling down house and crying hot stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy year old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom.

You surround the dead with veneration and memory, you dream of immortality, and in your myths and legends there’s always someone being resurrected, conquering death. But were your esteemed late great-grandfather really to suddenly rise from the grave and order a beer, panic would ensue.

I’ve never cheated on a lover. I’m faithful, always. But the war comes before anyone’s feelings. Every time.” Wow. Battle before love. Without a doubt, he was the most unromantic male she’d ever met. Even more so than her great-grandfather, who had laughingly burned her great-grandmother to death after she’d given birth to Gwen’s grandmother.

Grandfather : Death is nothing to be afraid of. Renee : It's not death I'm afraid of. Grandfather: What is it, then? Renee : LIFE

I couldn't understand death. I didn't know what it was. The only way I was able to measure it was by the fact I couldn't hear my grandfather's laugh anymore.

My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me. . . .Grandpa isn't coming back? No, she said. Not ever again. . . . And I remember saying, hold everything right fucking there. You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and clothing me and all . . . and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to and sometimes I just want to scream -- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head -- I go through all this, and then there's death? What is the motherfucking deal here? I wasn't having this. This was not fair.

Viktor had been very sad about their grandfather's death, but Flora had intuited that it was less the person he grieved for than the fact of death itself. Death meant that people actually disappeared. That everyone was going to disappear

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He DID things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

Would you?” Mom smiles and touches my hair, pushing it back from my forehead. I let her, but I grit my teeth. Her bare fingers brush my skin. I am thankful when none of my amulets crack. “Do you know what the Turkish say about coffee? It should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love. Isn’t that beautiful? My grandfather told me that when I was a little girl, and I never forgot it. Unfortunately, I still like my milk.

When we stop fighting against death, we are able to wake up to our lives.

I believe that when we come into this world, we are not promised glory, fortune, fame, a happy family or really anything at all. All we get is the journey. And in these pages, you will find mine. -Dipa to her Grandfather

The soul, it longs for its mate as mas as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul. But if you be happy all your days, as I was with your grandfather, subdue the body and marry the soul. Look for the heart-and-soul love.

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

...she waited until she and my grandfather Anthel were just home from their honeymoon, and then sat him down and told him this: "Honey, I know you like to take a drink, and that's all right, but be forewarned that I ain't your maid and I ain't your punching bag, and if you ever raise your hand to me you'd best kill me. Because otherwise I'll wait until you're asleep; sew you into the bed; and beat you to death with a frying pan." Until he died, I am told, my grandfather was a gentle man.

Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.

The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.

Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised.

Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

A bookseller," said Grandfather, "is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder up of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions. There come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all....Yes....It's a great vocation....Moreover his life is one of wide horizons. He deals in the stuff of eternity and there's no death in a bookseller's shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare is on his right hand and Shelley on his left.

I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much.

Our grandfathers didn't leave us much strength, not enough strength to live with, but just about enough to die a meaningless death. Ach!

This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.

And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis's dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Gaurds battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if I ever became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, 'So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It wont be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of the Romans. My history of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure that they'll enjoy it.

There was something about his grandfather's death, about men who love their sons . . .

My relatives worked hard all the time but never seemed to prosper. My grandfather was murdered when I was a teenager, but it didn't seem to matter much to the world outside our family.

By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. He is no towering oak tree with luxurious branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather he is like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life.

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battle field in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home. I try to ignore death, but she's got her arm around my waist waiting to poison everything I touch.

Thou askest me to take things seriously? After what thou didst last night? When thou needest to kill a man and instead did what you did? You were supposed to kill one, not make one! When we have just seen the sky full of airplanes of a quantity to kill us back to our grandfathers and forward to all unborn grandsons including all cats, goats and bedbugs. Airplanes making a noise to curdle the milk in your mother's breasts as they pass over darkening the sky and roaring like lions and you ask me to take things seriously. I take them too seriously already.

I remember first learning about death quite vividly. I'm not sure how old I was, but I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me. 'Sometimes, when someone gets ill, and they're very very old, they don't get better again. They just get iller and iller and then... then their body stops working.' 'I don't understand.' 'What's in them just goes away, and doesn't come back.' 'Grandpa isn't coming back?' 'No,' she said. 'Not ever again.' 'Grandpa said he was going away and not ever coming back after he held Grandma's head in that cotton-dump outside of town and kicked Skeeter seventy-three times.' 'Grandpa was very drunk. That's not the same as being dead. Grandpa's dead, son. He's not there anymore.' And I remember saying, 'Hold everything right fucking THERE. 'You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and feeding me and clothing me and all-- and, YEAH, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that's freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time-- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream-- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head-- I go through all this-- and then there's death? 'What is the motherfucking deal here?

Granger stood looking at Montag. "Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

The latter. She had a good run," Sook said, doing a little shrug. It was his usual response to death at Mapleshade, and it was a safe bet that he felt that way about himself. Like most twice-widowed, Korea-vet, nature-loving, gun-enthusiast, bilingual, weed-connoisseur great grandfathers of five, he'd lived a full life.

When the ships had lifted, they returned across the river to the silence of death. Then his grandfather told him, "Many fine things your father had planned for you: learning and useful work and a life of satisfaction and peace. Do you recall this?" "Yes, Grandfather." "The learning you shall have. You will learn patience and resource, the ability of your hands and your mind. You will have useful work: the destruction of evil men. What work could be more useful? This is Beyond; you will find that your work is never done—so therefore you may never know life of peace. However, I guarantee you ample satisfaction, for I will teach you to crave the blood of these men more than the flesh of woman." The old man had been as good as his word.

A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.

She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might have once provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.

His grandfather had told him many times that the greatest enemies of a fighting man were death and women.

[My grandfather] returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.

My grandfather came back, and his death bought the house at no. 6; half a century later it was turned into yet another journey to America. And that was fitting, because the history of a family begins when a person leaves home.

For fifty years I've watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift.

My mother’s family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, “He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.

My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him. We stood- the dead child and the living- on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forver. To please us both was an impossibility. ... 'Please don't let Daddy die, Susie,' he whispered. 'I need him.' When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced. I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles adn miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky to turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw something walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so deperately? 'Susie,' the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me. 'Remember?' he said. I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet. 'Granddaddy,' I said. And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet. 'Granddaddy,' I said. And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry. 'Do you remember?' he asked. 'Barber!' 'Adagio for Strings,' he said. But as we danced and spun- none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth- what I remembered was how I'd found him crying to this music and asked him why. 'Sometimes you cry,' Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.' He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather's huge backyard. We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather's chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco. When the music stopped, it cold have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfateher took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead… But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

I was scared. Nothing feels solid anymore. Security had been yanked out from under me. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. She just had to know how much. My grandfather had been old; he was supposed to die. Parents weren't. It was in my mother's arms when it hit me. Every day brought you that much closer to losing the ones you loved. Death would always find you, and there was nothing you could do about it.

My father was gone for Respectful Lady’s final hours, just as Grandfather is away from us now, which makes me wonder if a death vigil is something we women are compelled to do. I would not want Maoren to watch my final attempts at breath or see the messy things that happen as my soul departs my body.

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room. The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.

One day you will die, but death is not your enemy and it only makes you to appreciate life's gifts more with each passing second.

Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead.

Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.

Men like Francis would do anything to increase their social standing, including finding the balls to blackmail me in my office two weeks ago, right on the heels of my grandfather’s death.

One woman sent me on a letter written to her by her daughter, and the young girl's words are a remarkable statement about artistic creation as an infinitely versatile and subtle form of communication: '...How many words does a person know?' she asks her mother. 'How many does he use in his everyday vocabulary? One hundred, two, three? We wrap our feelings up in words, try to express in words sorrow and joy and any sort of emotion, the very things that can't in fact be expressed. Romeo uttered beautiful words to Juliet, vivid, expressive words, but they surely didn't say even half of what made his heart feel as if it was ready to jump out of his chest, and stopped him breathing, and made Juliet forget everything except her love? There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion—these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door.. The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real... And this doesn't happen through little Audrey, it's Tarkovsky himself addressing the audience directly, as they sit on the other side of the screen. There's no death, there is immortality. Time is one and undivided, as it says in one of the poems. "At the table are great-grandfathers and grandchildren.." Actually Mum, I've taken the film entirely from an emotional angle, but I'm sure there could be a different way of looking at it. What about you? Do write and tell me please..

Dear Kai, The sun is probably streaming in through the big barn windows now, which means you're awake. And if you're awake, it means you're wondering where I went. I haven't run away from you, I promise. But I knew that today of all days, they'd need me in the house. Tatiana may be the head of our household now, but she's not the one our staff will look to in my mother's absence. And there is so much to do to prepare for the funeral. Also, I have to go tell my grandfather what has happened to his daughter. I don't want him to hear of her death from anyone but me. Thank you for last night. I wish I could say I don't know why you re the one I ran to,- you, Kai, not Tatiana or my father or even my grandfather. But I know why. And I have a confession to make. After you let me cry, after you let me sob and shout and choke on all that pain-after you did all that, and didn't say a word-I didn't fall asleep like you thought. Not right away. I lay there, wadded up into a ball, and you curved your body behind mine. You were barely touching me-your thigh against the edge of my hip, your arm draped lightly across my waist, your fingers entwined with mine. How many times have our hands touched, when we were passing each other tools or helping each other in and out of machines? Hundreds of times. Thousands. But last night was different. You cradled my hand in yours, palms up, our fingers curled in like a pair of fallen leaves. Fallen, maybe, but not dead. My hand never felt so alive. Every place you touched me sparked with energy. I couldn't sleep. Not like that. And so I bent my head, just the slightest bit, until my mouth reached our hands. I smelled the oil you never quite get off your fingers. I breathed in the scent of your skin. And then, as if that was all I was doing, just breathing, I let my bottom lip brush against your knuckle. Time stopped, I was sure you'd see through my ruse and pull away. I was sure you'd know that I was not asleep, that I was not just breathing. But you didn't move, so I did it again. And again. And in the third time, I let my top lip join my bottom. I kissed your hand, Kai. I didn't do it to thank you for letting me cry. For letting me sleep in your arms. I thought you should know. Yours, Elliot Dear Elliot, I know. When will I see you again? Yours, Kai

Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came to his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: “It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for a long time.

Grandfathers are supposed to get tumors and die! That’s their job! What kind of shitty-ass grandfather isn’t walking around loaded with tumors? Not one I want to meet. Grandparent deaths are like practice deaths, a step above pet deaths, to help you have the barest preparation for a truly painful death. And this guy’s grandfather didn’t even have the decency to die! What a pair of assholes.

You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think “oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?” And along with this had come the contrary power, to make things normal. The world changed mightily, and within a few days humans considered it was normal. They had the most amazing ability to shut out and forget what didn’t fit. They told themselves little stories to explain away the inexplicable, to make things normal. Historians

The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German's blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying. In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death. Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him

I couldn't stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad, and now I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn't fight because they were all dead, beyond killing or punishing or any kind of reckoning. At least my grandfather had been able to join the army and go fight them. What could I do?

In the natural course of events, the period when death is taking over a body is fairly brief. My grandfather (who had no medication) had about a fortnight of this period in his life. Today it can drag on for months or years.

Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who had ascended to the throne on his grandfather’s death, realised that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading towards bankruptcy.

Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge.

For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty’s dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’ And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.

21. When we cease from activity, or follow a thought to its conclusion, it’s a kind of death. And it doesn’t harm us. Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation a kind of dying. Was that so terrible? Think about life with your grandfather, your mother, your adopted father. Realize how many other deaths and transformations and endings there have been and ask yourself: Was that so terrible? Then neither will the close of your life be—its ending and transformation.

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for prosperity, and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives. To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying, with a half-smile, to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room, and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When, in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she, like me, was pulled in two direction , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal. But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it, were you defying death, decay and the passage of time, or were you submitting to them? - I grew very bored with them.

...Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer, but old enough to die for his country. He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively if he must. He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. He is self-sufficient. ...He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cook his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own hurts. If you're thirsty, he'll share his water with you; if you are hungry, food. He'll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low. He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. He can save your life-or take it, because that is his job. He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed. He feels every note of the National Anthem vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to "square-away" those around him who haven't bothered to stand, remove their hat, or even stop talking. ...Just as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom. Beardless or not, he is not a boy. He is the American Fighting Man that has kept this country free for over two hundred years. He has asked nothing in return, except our friendship and understanding. Remember him, always, for he has earned our respect and admiration with his blood. And now we have women over there in danger, doing their part in this tradition of going to war when our nation calls us to do so. As you go to bed tonight, remember this. A short lull, a little shade, and a picture of loved ones in their helmets.

Donald’s monstrosity is the manifestation of the very weakness within him that he’s been running from his entire life. For him, there has never been any option but to be positive, to project strength, no matter how illusory, because doing anything else carries a death sentence; my father’s short life is evidence of that. The country is now suffering from the same toxic positivity that my grandfather deployed specifically to drown out his ailing wife, torment his dying son, and damage past healing the psyche of his favorite child, Donald J. Trump.

He in his black uniform with its death-heads, me the black grandchild. What would he have said to a dark-skinned granddaughter, who speaks Hebrew on top of that? I would have been a disgrace, a bastard who brought dishonor to the family. I am sure my grandfather would have shot me.

You surround the dead with veneration and memory, you dream of immortality, and in your myths and legends there's always someone being resurrected, conquering death. But were your esteemed late great-grandfather really to suddenly rise from the grave and order a beer, panic would ensue.

Grandfather died a few days after his hundredth birthday. Both Father and I were there at the end, in the room where I'd been born, forty-four years ago. It was not unlike that day, with sunlight streaming through the windows, and hummingbirds hovering outside, iridescent sun-glittering flashes of jewels. A dove was calling, back in the cool shade. Grandfather's hand was cool, as cool as the river. He tried to sit up to look out at the sunlight. "Sycamores grow by running water," he sang, "cottonwoods by still water," and then he died, and I felt a century slip away.

Donald’s monstrosity is the manifestation of the very weakness within him that he’s been running from his entire life. For him, there has never been any option but to be positive, to project strength, no matter how illusory, because doing anything else carries a death sentence; my father’s short life is evidence of that. The country is now suffering from the same toxic positivity that my grandfather deployed specifically to drown out his ailing wife, torment his dying son, and damage past healing the psyche of his favorite child, Donald J. Trump. “Everything’s great. Right, Toots?

We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the details of the lives that were lived. But it's harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus, to me he's a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He's not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun. Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop ... We are little more than one tree's growth of leaves in hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the other to make way for the next bright young generation.

While altering the saga of Odysseus’s Return to make my Elyman suitors serve as Penelope’s lovers, I had to protect myself against scandal. What if someone recognized the story and supposed that I, Nausicaa the irreproachable, had played the promiscuous harlot in my father’s absence? So, according to my poem, Penelope must have remained faithful to Odysseus throughout those twenty years. And because this change meant that Aphrodite had failed to take her traditional revenge, I must make Poseidon, not her, the enemy who delayed him on his homeward voyage after the Fall of Troy. I should therefore have to omit the stories of Penelope’s banishment and the oar mistaken for a flail, and Odysseus’s death from Telemachus’s sting-ray spear. When I told Phemius of these decisions, he pointed out, rather nastily, that since Poseidon had fought for the Greeks against the Trojans, and since Odysseus had never failed to honour him, I must justify this enmity by some anecdote. “Very well,” I answered. “Odysseus blinded a Cyclops who, happening to be Poseidon’s son, prayed to him for vengeance.” “My dear Princess, every Cyclops in the smithies of Etna was born to Uranus, Poseidon’s grandfather, by Mother Earth.” “Mine was an exceptional Cyclops,” I snapped. “He claimed Poseidon as his father and kept sheep in a Sican cave, like Conturanus. I shall call him Polyphemus—that is, ‘famous’—to make my hearers think him a more important character than he really was.” “Such deceptions tangle the web of poetry.” “But if I offer Penelope as a shining example for wives to follow when their husbands are absent on long journeys, that will excuse the deception.

It Rained for Two Days Straight Yesterday, Ryan told me his grandfather was admitted to the hospital. It was raining the way it rains in the movies, like whoever does the dishes left the faucet running, heavy drops polishing everything in the city dark. We ran from one drooling awning to the next, quicker, then slower, quicker, slower. If one had watched from the sky, our bodies would have looked like two small needles being pulsed forward by some invisible machine, stitching the streets together. Today, Patric was left by a girl he did not love but did not not love. He told me it was impossible to imagine himself both alone and whole. It was still raining--the sky's silly metaphor for sadness, untimely, startling, the way it makes the whole world more honest. Death is like this, too. Heartache, also. The sudden absence of what was there but now not. I touched Patrick's shoulder, attempting to pass my human to his. I sent Ryan a poem. I cannot do more than this art of bearing witness, to be both the bucket and the mirror, to say, yes, you are here but I am here also, to say you won't be here forever, or to say nothing and just walk beside each other in the rain.

Swann’s father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns’ family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather

I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: among books. In my grandfather's study, they were everywhere; it was forbidden to dust them except once a year, before the October term. Even before I could read, I already revered these raised stones; upright or leaning, wedged together like bricks on the library shelves or nobly placed like avenues of dolmens, I felt that our family prosperity depended on them. They were all alike, and I was romping about in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by squat, ancient monuments which had witnessed my birth, which would witness my death and whose permanence guaranteed me a future as calm as my past. I used to touch them in secret to honour my hands with their dust but I did not have much idea what to do with them and each day I was present at ceremonies whose meaning escaped me: my grandfather - so clumy, normally, that my grandmother buttoned his gloves for him - handled these cultural objects with the dexterity of an officiating priest. Hundreds of times I saw him get up absent-mindedly, walk round the table, cross the room in two strides, unhesitatingly pick out a volume without allowing himself time for choice, run through it as he went back to his armchair, with a combined movement of his thumb and right forefinger, and, almost before he sat down, open it with a flick "at the right page," making it creak like a shoe. I sometimes got close enough to observe these boxes which opened like oysters and I discovered the nakedness of their internal organs, pale, dank, slightly blistering pages, covered with small black veins, which drank ink and smelt of mildew.

My uncle’s death confirmed all of my grandfather’s fears about himself and his place in the family. He could not protect. He could not provide. Emasculation at the hands of the state is a very cunning thing for the state to do because men will never see it coming from the state. They’ll blame the subjects in their own kingdoms, the women and children to whom they are lords. The only people to whom they are lords.

What on earth prompted you to bother Grandfather?” “I just wanted to get away from you,” I mumbled. “I didn’t know he was in there.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking but it quavered anyway. Great-grandfather had frightened me half to death. “From the look on his face, you scared the wits out of him,” Dad said. “I wonder who the devil he thought you were.” I shuddered. “Someone he didn’t like very much, that’s for sure.

The house was built in 1872. Seventy-seven years later his grandfather was the first to die in it. What others had lain in state in that hallway had been carried there on a gate or wrapped in a wagonsheet or delivered crated up in a raw pineboard box with a teamster standing at the door with a bill of lading. The ones that came at all. For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram.

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied. Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day. She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago. What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands. What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five. What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind. What stalked Eva now.

Apophis the god of Chaos Anubis the god of funerals and death Babi the baboon god Bast the cat goddess Bes the dwarf god Disturber a god of judgement who works for Osiris Geb the earth god Gengen-Wer the goose god Hapi the god of the Nile Heket the frog goddess Horus the war god, son of Isis and Osiris Isis the goddess of magic, wife of her brother Osiris and mother of Horus Khepri the scarab god, Ra’s aspect in the morning Khonsu the moon god Mekhit minor lion goddess, married to Onuris Neith the hunting goddess Nekhbet the vulture goddess Nut the sky goddess Osiris the god of the Underworld, husband of Isis and father of Horus Ra the sun god, the god of order; also known as Amun-Ra Sekhmet the lion goddess Serqet the scorpion goddess Set the god of evil Shu the air god, great-grandfather of Anubis Sobek the crocodile god Tawaret the hippo goddess Thoth the god of knowledge

They came to a destroyed cabin and he pulled up and then went inside. Broken cups and pieces of dress material torn on a nail. A doll’s body without a head. He dug a .50-caliber bullet out of the wall with his knife and then carefully placed it on the windowsill as if for a memento. Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one’s father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out, Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work. Your heart melted sweetly, it slowed, lost its edges. Horses, horses. All gone in the burning.

a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.

Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teeth. That was the image This was left with, the one that ever since was the first to recur when he thought of his dead grandfather: shriveled apple cores on the sill of a window that looked out onto an overgrown garden.

Doctor, he's going to be all right, isn't he? He won't-he won't die, will he?" Apparently, James Keene was aware that his naturally glum face and drooping eyes presented, merely in repose, an expression that did little to inspire confidence. He cultivated a warm smile, a soft yet confident tone of voice, and an almost grandfatherly manner that, although perhaps calculated, seemed genuine and helped balance the perpetual gloom God had seen fit to visit upon his countenance.

I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn’t afraid anymore.... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn’t afraid anymore.

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us the jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.’ Montag

My grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime.I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

His beautiful silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb's death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in. His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun, It was beautiful, watching him get old-ancient-now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion-the slowest-from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.

It’s strange, I don’t miss her, it’s strange I don’t feel much of anything,” said Montag. “Even if she dies, I realized a moment ago, I don’t think I’ll feel sad. It isn’t right. Something must be wrong with me.” “Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was an individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.” Montag walked in silence. “Millie, Millie,” he whispered. “Millie.” “What?” “My wife, my wife. Poor Millie, poor, poor Millie. I can’t remember anything. I think of her hands but I don’t see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides or they lie there in her lap or there’s a cigarette in them, but that’s all.

Fiona couldn't summon a smile. His grandfather sighed. 'If you insist on pity, then really you must pity yourself. Your head is still very empty.' Fionn frowned, indignation jostling the urge to cry fro a precious, fleeting second. His grandfather chuckled. 'Start filling it up, lad. That is your greatest responsibility. To live a life of breathless wonder, so that when it begins to fade from you, you will feel the shadow of its happiness still inside you and the blissful sense that you laughed the loudest, loved the deepest, and lived fearlessly, even as the specifics of it all melt away.

We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi, her sister or her husband - both gone - obscure friends - dead - obscurer aunts and uncles - lost - ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs - passed or passing on; and in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once - appalling - but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap. Her talk's a fence - shade drawn, window fastened, door that's locked - for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who's come to get her; and it occurs to me that in my listening posture I'm the boy who suffered the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness, that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as badly stacekd cards. Thus was I, when I loved you, every man I could be, youth and child - far from enough - and you, so strangely ambiguous a being, met me, h eart for spade, play after play, the whole run of our suits.

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the hings he did. I cried becase he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten millions fine actions the night he passed on. IMy wife, my wide. Poor Millie, poor, poor Millie. I can't remember anything. I think of her hands but I don't see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides [watching TV] or lie there on her lap or there's a cigarette in them, but that's all.

Every day," I said, "every day I go to work and I see my granddad. I see the drunks and the addicts, the people who have fallen right off the edge of the earth. I see people who have made every bad move anyone could make, made every major mistake there was to be made, and by the time I see them, they are paying for it, sometimes with their lives. That's why they came to the ER. "When you work in emergency medicine, you are seeing patients who are the least common denominator as far as human beings go; people who are heartbreakingly stupid and ditty and drunk and high and obnoxious--unbelievably obnoxious. These people have all flowed out of the darkest side of life. And when you are finished with them, that's mostly where they'll return. So each of you who is thinking you want to go into emergency medicine will have to ask yourself, 'Do I really want to do this?'" I tapped my chest. "I know the answer for myself--every day I work I'm taking care of someone who is just like my grandfather, someone just like my mother. But everyone in this room needs to ask himself or herself, 'Do I want to spend the rest of my life with addicts and idiots and drunks and psychotics? Is this what will make me happy?'" I peered at all of them over the top of the microphone. "Very few sane people answer yes.

Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.

The music of cri-cri and cigales droned on in a hypnotic rhythm, punctuated by the occasional croon of the nightingale. I thought of lullabies and how as a child they would placate my disappointment that another day had ended. I was used to sleeping in strange places, and would always focus on sound to relax. In the pawnshop, it was the ticking of grandfather clocks or the tuning of antique instruments. In the thieves’ den, it was striking of a match, the bubbling of a water pipe and the gentle murmur floating in off the streets. On the Wastrel, it was the wind or the creaking wood. It was important to me to find lullabies where I could. If death came with a lullaby, perhaps fewer men would fear it.

He speculated that, just as a powerful west wind blows away thick banks of clouds, the graphic, scorching emotion that passed through his soul in the form of a dream must have canceled and negated the longing for death, a longing that had reached out and grabbed him around the neck. All that remained now was a sort of quiet resignation. A colorless, neutral, empty feeling. He was sitting alone in a huge, old, vacant house, listening as a massive grandfather clock hollowly ticked away time. His mouth was closed, his eyes fixed on the clock as he watched the hands move forward. His feelings were wrapped in layer upon layer of thin membrane and his heart was still a blank, as he aged, one hour at a time.

On the few occasions when we did visit my grandfather at the Evergreen Moral Home for the Aged Sick and Handicapped, I never wanted to go back. It's the smells that hit you first, the nauseatingly sweet smell of open sores and wet bandages, reeking of urine, saliva, sweat, pus -— the stench of incurable sickness blanketed by the pungent odour of strong medicine. I stood at the doorway, gagging, my lungs fighting to adapt to the atmosphere. This wasn't the smell of death — that is bearable — no, this was the noxious smell of decomposition, when flesh and soul and heart and bone separate, then rot, deteriorate until all is reduced to a putrid pile of rubbish ready to be wheeled out. The syrupy smell of decay.

The morning after my mother’s death, I was surprised to see the sunrise. From behind the curtain of my bedroom window I was surprised to see the people leave their homes and begin the day. Downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock continued to tick, marking each passing hour with a chime that echoed over the black and white chessboard tiles of the front hall. I was surprised to see the mail come at the same time as the day before and, later that evening, the sun set once more as it did since the beginning of time. My mother’s death did not disturb the planets in their courses. And, though everything kept moving like she never existed at all, my world erupted into chaos until the universe swirled around me like a whirlpool of scattering stars.

your old grandfather, you know, who died before you were born—he used to say to me, ‘Learn all you can, John, about anything and everything. There is no telling when a chance may pop up for you to use what you thought you never would use.’ It’s a good rule. I practiced on it once when I saw a man making a wagon. I watched just how he fixed the wheel and the holes for the nails, and everything, and I said, right out loud, ‘It isn’t anyways likely that I shall ever make a wagon, but then I might as well know how to do it. And it wasn’t a week after that we broke down going across the prairie, your mother and me and two children; and if I hadn’t known just how to fix that wheel we would have frozen to death likely enough before we could get anywhere.

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton's family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

For thousands of years, scarcely anyone left. Korea was the hermit kingdom, with its spiritual basis in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism, until 1910, when it was annexed by Japan and colonized for thirty-five years thereafter, followed by the Korean War in 1950. Having been born and raised under these brutal colonizers, my paternal grandfather spoke fluent Japanese. Shortly before his death, in the mid-1980s, he came to stay with my family in Queens, where he befriended a young Japanese woman, a missionary from the Unification Church. When my father confronted him about his sudden interest in the cult, my grandfather answered that he didn’t care about the Moonies, he only enjoyed the chance to speak Japanese with his new friend. Like others from his generation, he suffered from a sort of Stockholm syndrome and missed the language of his oppressors.

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands.

One can see in the description of the earnest game of Ernst, the eldest grandson of grandfather Freud, not a theoretical argument that would allow one to conclude that there is a repetition compulsion or a death drive or a limit to the pleasure principle—you know that he does not do this—but an auto-biography of Freud, not simply an auto-biography of Freud writing his life but living description of his own writing, of his way of writing what he writes, especially in Beyond, the fascination this story of the spool holds for readers stemming perhaps less from its demonstrative value than from its value as a repetition en abyme of what Freud does in Beyond, this value of a repetition en abyme of Freud's writing, having itself a relation of structural mimesis with the relation between the pleasure principle and the death drive, this latter not being opposed to the former but hollowing it out, en abyme, orignarily, at the origin of the origin.

He was succeeded on the throne by RAGNAR. At this time Fro (Frey?), the King of Sweden, after slaying Siward, the King of the Norwegians, put the wives of Siward's kinsfolk in bonds in a brothel, and delivered them to public outrage. When Ragnar heard of this, he went to Norway to avenge his grandfather. As he came, many of the matrons, who had either suffered insult to their persons or feared imminent peril to their chastity, hastened eagerly to his camp in male attire, declaring that they would prefer death to outrage. Nor did Ragnar, who was to punish this reproach upon the women, scorn to use against the author of the infamy the help of those whose shame he had come to avenge. Among them was Ladgerda, a skilled amazon, who, though a maiden, had the courage of a man, and fought in front among the bravest with her hair loose over her shoulders. All-marvelled at her matchless deeds, for her locks flying down her back betrayed that she was a woman.

The Vietnamese worshiped their ancestors as the source of their lives, their fortunes, and their civilization. In the rites of ancestor worship the child imitated the gestures of his grandfather so that when he became the grandfather, he could repeat them exactly to his grandchildren. In this passage of time that had no history the death of a man marked no final end. Buried in the rice fields that sustained his family, the father would live on in the bodies of his children and grandchildren. As time wrapped around itself, the generations to come would regard him as the source of their present lives and the arbiter of their fate. In this continuum of the family “private property” did not really exist, for the father was less of an owner than a trustee of the land to be passed on to his children. To the Vietnamese the land itself was the sacred, constant element: the people flowed over the land like water, maintaining and fructifying it for the generations to come.

micel walcan wolde we do from that daeg micel walcan in the great holt the brunnesweald but though we walced for wices months years though this holt becum ham to me for so long still we did not see efen a small part of it so great was this deop eald wud. so great was it that many things dwelt there what was not cnawan to man but only in tales and in dreams. wihts for sure the boar the wulf the fox efen the bera it was saed by sum made this holt their ham. col beorners and out laws was in here as they was in all wuds but deop deoper efen than this was the eald wihts what was in angland before men here i is meanan the aelfs and the dweorgs and ents who is of the holt who is the treows them selfs. my grandfather he telt me he had seen an aelf at dusc one daeg he seen it flittan betweon stoccs of treows thynne it was and grene and its eages was great and blaec and had no loc of man in them. well he was blithe to lif after that for oft it is saed that to see an aelf is to die for they sceots their aelf straels at thu and aelfscot is a slow death

Here are pictures of the sources for Daoist mijue "master to disciple" oral teachings, as shown in the manuals used by Daoist masters themselves. The manuals are insufficient for the casual reader to use, the oral koujue explanations given on a personal one-to-one basis are essential. After seeing how Daoists from Longhu Shan,as well as foreign ("american") Dao for $$$ have falsified their use, I am reluctant to share them in full, until a true Qingwei or Zhengyi Grade five and above master ask to see them. The Qingwei (5 thunder-vajra") Daoist seen performing the purification mudra in image #5 below (a mudra shared by Daoists, Tendai Tantric Buddhists in Japan, and Tibetan masters) said when he had seen the manuals shown in pictures 1-4. "Where is the other half of the Thunder-Vajra manual?" Then I knew that it was OK to give it to him! He gave me his address in Jiangxi province; I intend to bring the mijue manual to him on my next trip to China, as Master Zhuang asked me to do, (before his death in 1976, an order given to his maternal great grandfather by the 61st Longhu Shan master, in 1868)! [Saso facebook post, May 7 2015]

He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead … But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. ... There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

I am the father, mother, and grandfather of this universe. I am the one who dispenses the fruits of people’s actions, their karma. I am the one thing worth knowing, and I am the enabler of all knowing. As water gets purified by filtering through earth, and other things get purified by being washed in water, mankind gets purified by contact with Me. I am the syllable Om, the very sound of Divinity. I am all the scriptures ever written. I am the goal at the end of all paths. I am the landlord of all creation. I am the inner witness in every human. I am your only lasting shelter; all beings dwell in Me. I am your best friend who lives in your heart as your conscience. I am the beginning of creation, the well-wisher of it, and the dissolution of it. I am the storehouse into which all life returns when creation dissolves — and I am the everlasting, imperishable seed from which it again springs. I give the heat of the sun. I let loose the food-giving rain, and I withhold it. I am both immortality and death (doled out based on the fruits of one’s actions). I am both being and nonbeing. In My visible form I am the cosmos; in My invisible form I am the germ that lies hidden.

In E-CENT counselling, we teach our clients to explore the stories they are living, which mainly come from their family of origin. Even some novelists understand this process, as illustrated by Donna Tartt, writing about the family of Charlotte Cleve: “…the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history – repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before… … (T)hese family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruellest and most random disasters … were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth”. Donna Tartt, 2003. The Little Friend, London: Bloomsbury. Pages 3-4.

It is this kind of consciousness, exacerbated to an extreme, which has made inevitable the so called "death of God." Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later "dies," because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will. For a long time man continued to be capable of this willfulness: but now the effort has become exhausting and many Christians have realised it to be futile. Relaxing the effort, they have let go the "God-object" which their fathers and grandfathers still hoped to manipulate for their own ends. Their weariness has accounted for the element of resentment which made this a conscious "murder" of the deity. Liberated from the strain of willfully maintaining an object-God in existence, the Cartesian consciousness remains none the less imprisoned in itself. Hence the need to break out of itself and to meet "the other" in "encounter," "openness," "fellowship," "communion".

Imagine a soldier who believes killing another human being is wrong, kills his first human being in war when he has never killed before. Worse still, imagine this same soldier has his enemy in his sites and the enemy appears defenseless. Here, he might be allowed the luxury to have that moment with himself to debate whether he should pull the trigger or not. But on another day he may not have that luxury. Imagine further, a soldier is in this situation because his father was a soldier, and his grandfather was a soldier, and he is trying to please them but, unlike them, he doesn’t believe killing people in war is right, yet there he is on the battlefield anyway where ‘killed or be killed’ leads the list in the army’s operation manual. So, he pulls the trigger anyway even though he’s categorically against killing another human being. And maybe this is the first time he’s compromised on such a high principle and he continues killing other people as long as he’s in the war and each time it becomes easier and easier until his principle, his absolute truth, is a motto not to live by, but one that is just a topic of conversation in a philosophy class or a backyard barbecue. War has changed him. From Messages From a Grandfather, by Robert Gately

Now his grandfather’s actions were adding to his unwanted notoriety. The death of Ian’s father had evidently caused the old duke to feel some belated request for the estrangement, and for the last twelve years he’d been writing to Ian periodically. At first he had pleaded with Ian to come and visit him at Stanhope. When Ian ignored his letters, he’d tried bribing him with promises to name Ian his legitimate heir. Those letters had gone unanswered, and for the last two years the old man’s silence had misled Ian into thinking he’d given up. Four months ago, however, another letter bearing Stanhope’s ducal crest had been delivered to Ian, and this one infuriated him. The old man had imperiously given Ian four months in which to appear at Stanhope and meet with him to discuss arrangements for the transfer of six estates-estates that would have been Ian’s father’s inheritance had the duke not disowned him. According to the letter, if Ian did not appear, the duke planned to proceed without him, publicly naming him his heir. Ian had written to his grandfather for the first time in his life; the note had been short and final. It was also eloquent proof that Ian Thornton was as unforgiving as his grandfather, who’d rejected his own son for two decades: Try it and you’ll look a fool. I’ll disclaim all knowledge of any relationship with you, and if you still persist, I’ll let your title and your estates rot.

When he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on. Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags and crates, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of 'Betty and Veronica' that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mistery of the two big-toothed wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in those terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic—not the apparent magic of a silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world—the reality—that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.

...He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively is he must. He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. He is self-sufficient. ...He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cool his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own hurts. ...He'll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low. He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. He can save your life- or take it, because that is his job. He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed. He feels every note of the National Anthem vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to "square-away" those around him who haven't bothered to stand, remove their hat, or even stop talking. ...Just as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom. Beardless or not, he is not a boy. He is the American Fighting Man that has kept this country free for over two hundred years. He has asked nothing in return, except our friendship and understanding. Remember him, always, for he has earned our respect and admiration with his blood. And now we even have women over there in danger, doing their part in this tradition of going to war when our nation calls us to do so. As you go to bed tonight, remember this. A short lull, a little shade, and a picture of loved ones in their helmets.

Ian’s method of dealing with Sir Francis Belhaven—who, his grandfather had discovered, was boasting that Elizabeth had spent several days with him—was less subtle and even more effective. “Belhaven,” Ian said after spending a half hour searching for the repulsive knight. The stout man had whirled around in surprise, leaving his acquaintances straining to hear Ian’s low conversation with him. “I find your presence repugnant,” Ian had said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I dislike your coat, I dislike your shirt, and I dislike the knot in your neckcloth. In fact, I dislike you. Have I offended you enough yet, or shall I continue?” Belhaven’s mouth dropped open, his pasty face turning a deathly gray. “Are—are you trying to force a—duel?” “Normally one doesn’t bother shooting a repulsive toad, but in this instance I’m prepared to make an exception, since this toad doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut!” “A duel, with you?” he gasped. “Why, it would be no contest—none at all. Everyone knows what kind of marksman you are. It would be murder.” Ian leaned close, speaking between his clenched teeth. “It’s going to be murder, you miserable little opium-eater, unless you suddenly remember very vocally that you’ve been joking about Elizabeth Cameron’s visit.” At the mention of opium the glass slid from his fingers and crashed to the floor. “I have just realized I was joking.” “Good,” Ian said, restraining the urge to strangle him. “Now start remembering it all over the ballroom!” “Now that, Thornton,” said an amused voice from Ian’s shoulder as Belhaven scurried off to begin doing as bidden, “makes me hesitate to say that he is not lying.” Still angry with Belhaven, Ian turned in surprise to see John Marchman standing there. “She was with me as well,” Marchman said. “All aboveboard, for God’s sake, so don’t look at me like I’m Belhaven. Her aunt Berta was there every moment.” “Her what?” Ian said, caught between fury and amusement. “Her Aunt Berta. Stout little woman who doesn’t say much.” “See that you follow her example,” Ian warned darkly.

In the entire endless evening his serenity received a jolt only a few times. The first was when someone who didn’t know who he was confided that only two months ago Lady Elizabeth’s uncle had sent out invitations to all her former suitors offering her hand in marriage. Suppressing his shock and loathing for her uncle, Ian had pinned an amused smile on his face and confided, “I’m acquainted with the lady’s uncle, and I regret to say he’s a little mad. As you know, that sort of thing runs,” Ian had finished smoothly, “in our finest families.” The reference to England’s hopeless King George was unmistakable, and the man had laughed uproariously at the joke. “True,” he agreed. “Lamentably true.” Then he went off to spread the word that Elizabeth’s uncle was a confirmed loose screw. Ian’s method of dealing with Sir Francis Belhaven-who, his grandfather had discovered, was boasting that Elizabeth had spent several days with him-was less subtle and even more effective. “Belhaven,” Ian said after spending a half hour searching for the repulsive knight. The stout man had whirled around in surprise, leaving his acquaintances straining to hear Ian’s low conversation with him. “I find your presence repugnant,” Ian had said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I dislike your coat, I dislike your shirt, and I dislike the knot in your neckcloth. In fact, I dislike you. Have I offended you enough yet, or shall I continue?” Belhaven’s mouth dropped open, his pasty face turning a deathly gray. “Are-are you trying to force a-duel?” “Normally one doesn’t bother shooting a repulsive toad, but in this instance I’m prepared to make an exception, since this toad doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut!” “A duel, with you?” he gasped. “Why, it would be no contest-none at all. Everyone knows what sort of marksman you are. It would be murder.” Ian leaned close, speaking between his clenched teeth. “It’s going to be murder, you miserable little opium-eater, unless you suddenly remember very vocally that you’ve been joking about Elizabeth Cameron’s visit.” At the mention of opium the glass slid from his fingers and crashed to the floor. “I have just realized I was joking.” “Good,” Ian said, restraining the urge to strangle him. “Now start remembering it all over this ballroom!” “Now that, Thornton,” said an amused voice from Ian’s shoulder as Belhaven scurried off to begin doing as bidden, “makes me hesitate to say that he is not lying.” Still angry with Belhaven, Ian turned in surprise to see John Marchman standing there. “She was with me as well,” Marchman sad. “All aboveboard, for God’s sake, so don’t look at me like I’m Belhaven. Her aunt Berta was there every moment.” “Her what?” Ian said, caught between fury and amusement. “Her Aunt Berta. Stout little woman who doesn’t say much.” “See that you follow her example,” Ian warned darkly. John Marchman, who had been privileged to fish at Ian’s marvelous stream in Scotland, gave his friend an offended look. “I daresay you’ve no business challenging my honor. I was considering marrying Elizabeth to keep her out of Belhaven’s clutches; you were only going to shoot him. It seems to me that my sacrifice was-“ “You were what?” Ian said, feeling as if he’d walked in on a play in the middle of the second act and couldn’t seem to hold onto the thread of the plot or the identity of the players. “Her uncle turned me down. Got a better offer.” “Your life will be more peaceful, believe me,” Ian said dryly, and he left to find a footman with a tray of drinks.

My grandfather had never been sick a day in his life; he had never missed a day of work; he had never been sidelined by depression or anxiety or heartbreak, not even when his wife was near death. He appeared to have no vulnerabilities at all and therefore couldn’t recognize or sanction them in other people.

Only a few generations earlier, Khubilai’s ancestors had used the hunt as the primary means of acquiring food. His great-grandfather Yesugei had been out hunting with his gyrfalcon when he saw the bride Hoelun, whom he seized to make his own wife. Khubilai’s grandfather Genghis Khan fed his family by hunting after his father’s death, and he had killed his half brother Begter in an argument ostensibly following a hunting quarrel about a bird and a fish. Later in life, Genghis Khan, with the aid of Subodei and other good hunters, adapted the extensive hunting strategies, techniques, and weapons to the task of warfare by treating his enemies as objects of prey to be trapped and stalked, and he thereby conquered his vast empire. The hunt combined a recreational pastime enjoyed by Khubilai with the imperial needs of ceremonial pomp and wasteful spectacle.

Many people have stories of bravery during the Holocaust. I am no braver than anyone else. 6,000,000 Jews lost their lives during the war. They are the heroes, my son, not me. I was lucky.” “Some people make their own luck, Zayde! You are one of those. I’m so proud to be your grandson.” “Then you’ll do me a favor?” “Anything.” “Tell everyone you know about the brave Jews who escaped from Auschwitz but don’t tell them about your grandfather.” “Why not? I’m so proud of you! You were part of the resistance.” “Because it is not important that one of the Holocaust survivors is your Zayde. All Jews are relatives—all are important, especially after the death of the 6,000,000 and so many other attempts to wide us out . . .

the law take its course,” as my great-grandfather had done at the fork of the roads one day earlier, they were understood to be promising death under a legal guise.

They had been friends since kindergarten, started dating in ninth grade, and got married after high school. My grandfather will tell you that there was no way to convince either one of them to wait just a little bit longer. They knew. Some people are lucky like that. They meet their best friend, the love of their life, and are wise enough to never let go. Unfortunately, my parents’ love story got cut far too short. Just before she died, Mom told me she was ready. She said she was tired of fighting and tired of missing Dad. She thought of death as a new beginning—said she was going to go spend the rest of her next life with Dad, and I’d like to think that’s exactly what they’re doing now. Best friends together again.

My Italian grandmother did not expect work to be a reflection of her identity. After my grandfather passed away, she did what she had to do to take care of their five children. She opened a coffee shop in a small town in the heel of Italy’s boot and worked there for thirty years. Until her death, she had a single bulbous bicep from repeatedly pulling down the manual lever of the espresso machine. Her identity was straightforward. First, she was a woman of faith. Then a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a fresh-pasta maker. She enjoyed her work at the coffee shop—loved it, even—but it did not define her.

If it can be said that the grandchildren "soon get used" to something that would have made the grandfathers fight duels to the death, it is always assumed that the grandchildren have found a new mode of living, whereas those who fought the duel to the death were already dead. But the psychological fact is exactly the other way. The duellists may have been fastidious or even fantastic, but they were frightfully alive.

It seems rather arbitrary. Why should one fellow sell potatoes on a street corner in Whitechapel while another wastes his days in a castle because his great-grandfather played cards and wenched with King Henry VIII?

Actually, my 106-year-old grandfather is doing a better job at putting off death than I am at avoiding Spirit Week. There’s only one word for it: inevitable.

Wait,” she said, suddenly stopping. “What if Grandfather Frost comes and there’s no tree, where will he put his presents?” He was at a loss. No sensible answer suggested itself. He felt infinitely weary. “Perhaps we should paint a fir tree on the wall to tell him where,” said Sonya, pondering the matter aloud. “Got any green paint?” “No,” said Viktor. “I know what – we’ll leave a note in the kitchen saying put them on the table.” Sonya thought. “Under is better.” “Why?” “So nobody sees.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

Grandfather encourages me to continue. “Yin is—” “The source of death,” I finish for him. “Yang is—” “The root of life. Yin is shadowy and female, while yang is positive and male.” Grandfather

If the religion of my grandfather Muhammad is not to remain except by my death, then, O swords, take me.

We arrived, and my aunt took me aside and asked, "Can you do this?" My grandfather Brown was a little heavy and I thought she was asking if I was physically strong enough to lift him. "Oh, sure. I can lift him, no problem." "No, I know you can lift him, but can you do this?" She wasn't talking to Caleb Wilde, the funeral director. She was talking to Caleb Wilde, the grandson. It took me a minute to switch from funeral director to grandson, but I gathered myself and said, "Yes." I don't think my answer satisfied her, and I don't think it satisfied me, either.

frame Tom for the two murders. What did he have against Tom?’ ‘Ah,’ Richard said, ‘you’re right. He didn’t have anything against Tom. Not really. But I remembered something that your solicitor said when she showed me Grandfather William’s will. She said that when Freddie died, the trust would automatically be dissolved and would then be inherited in its entirety by Freddie’s firstborn, assuming that that person was over the age of eighteen, of sound mind and body, and – crucially – had no unspent prison time. ‘That’s why Matthew worked so hard to pin the murders on his brother. Because the moment we arrested Tom, he’d be stopped from inheriting anything. And when Tom was then convicted of double murder – as I’m sure he would have been, considering the evidence against him, both direct and indirect – then he’d have ended up in prison. Tom would have been ineligible to inherit. The whole estate would automatically have passed on to the next oldest child, Matthew. And seeing as Matthew has always been on record as wanting to sell the plantation, it wouldn’t have even begun to look suspicious when he then sold the plantation for five million dollars. ‘So Matthew wasn’t just killing the only two people in the world he thought knew his secret shame. He was also making sure he inherited five million dollars. And five million dollars is always an incentive to commit murder. Don’t you think, Sylvie?’ A few minutes later, Richard emerged from the shower room to see Dwayne and Fidel already guarding the locked boot of the Police jeep where a handcuffed Matthew was sitting inside. From the way his shoulders were heaving up and down, Richard could see that he was crying. As for Camille, she’d taken Andy Lucas off to the shade of a palm tree and was talking to him. ‘Detective Inspector?’ a voice said from behind Richard. Richard turned and saw Hugh standing by the entrance to the shower room with Rosie and Tom. As for Sylvie, she was already heading back to the main house on her own. ‘I’m sorry,’ Hugh said. ‘That you saw our family…like this. That you saw what we’re really like.’ Richard knew that there was nothing he could say that would make Hugh feel any better.

But as the British Empire pulled up its tent pegs and struck camp to head home, I realized that there would be anger and resentment towards my race. The white man has given India many things of great value but he has also taken far more than his share and, in many cases, imposed unjust prejudices and priorities on people who have lived under the yoke of foreign domination for nearly a century and a half. Whatever reprisals occur might not take the extreme forms of violence that erupted in 1857, when my grandfather and other family members were slaughtered during the Mutiny. Nevertheless, if politics spills into the streets it is a scourge that turns friends into adversaries, reducing human behaviour to a brute contest in which all rules are abandoned and there can be no victor, only the vanquished. Some journalists have described it as the ‘law of the jungle’, which is an odious comparison, for in the absence of man, most jungles exist in peaceful harmony, governed by laws of nature and the eternal, equitable balance between life and death.

Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one’s father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out, Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work.

I need to find out why my grandfather is . . . acting strange.’ ‘Can’t you ask him?’ ‘He won’t tell me!’ ‘Does he throw up a lot?’ ‘I shouldn’t think so. He doesn’t often eat. The occasional curry, once or twice a month.’ ‘He must be pretty thin.’ ‘You’ve no idea.’ ‘Well, then . . . Does he often stare at himself in the mirror and say “Arrgh”? Or stick out his tongue and wonder why it’s gone yellow? You see, it’s possible I might have some measure of influence over people who are hung over. If he’s been drinking a lot, I might be able to find him.’ ‘I can’t see him doing any of those things. I think I’d better tell you . . . My grandfather is Death.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ ‘I said Death.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Death. You know . . . Death?’ ‘You mean the robes, the—’ ‘—scythe, white horse, bones . . . yes. Death.’ ‘I just want to make sure I’ve got this clear,’ said the oh god in a reasonable tone of voice. ‘You think your grandfather is Death and you think he’s acting strange?

We know, instinctively, that we don’t end at death. We know it through the practise of grief. We pull each other through. My grandfather taught me more about death after his death than any book of spiritual teaching. He never left me. Even though I left him, left the country, wasn’t there by his side when he died.

On August 3, 2020, a day before the United States surpassed 150,000 deaths from COVID, Donald’s interview with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan aired on HBO. “It is what it is,” he said after Swan pointed out that a thousand Americans were dying every day. That was a popular expression in my family, and hearing it sent a chill down my spine. Whenever my grandfather, my aunt, or one of my uncles had said it, it was always with a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair.

Did he know he was going to die?" I asked, and Grandfather looked at me in surprise-his little granddaughter again. "He was eight-seven," he said in his stroke language. Grandfather studied my face carefully then, missing nothing. He watched my face the way he would have watched the cedars for a songbird he was trying to lure in with his screech owl calls. I was the young woman who would be burying him. He was trying to have it both-the afterlife and the here. His face was as curious as a young boy's.

Grandfather: A Native American’s Lifelong Search for Truth and Harmony with Nature, published in 1993 by Tom Brown, Jr., a wilderness survival teacher from New Jersey, told the story of the author growing up under the tutelage and mentorship of a Lipan Apache scout and shaman named Stalking Wolf.

When grandfather Henry, that masterful man, removed across the border, he was followed by a patriarchal train of manservants and maidservants, mares, geldings, and spaniels, vans full of household stuff, and slow country waggons loaded with nodding greenery. “I want to make sure of a good eating apple,” said he, “since I am going to Lady Place for life.” Death was another matter. The Willowes burial-ground was in Dorset, nor would Henry lie elsewhere. Now it was Everard’s turn. The dead appeared to welcome him without astonishment—the former Everards and Tituses, Lauras and Emmelines; they were sure that he would come, they approved his decision to join them.

The field of battle is my temple. I mentally chant a saying my grandfather taught me the day he met me, when I was six. He insists it sharpens the mind the way a whetstone sharpens a blade. The swordpoint is my priest. The dance of death is my prayer. The killing blow is my release.

On the doorstep was a woman. Definitely not a late-arriving friend who’d been forgotten. This woman was large and shabby. She wore wellingtons and a knitted hat. She reminded Juliet of the homeless people she encountered occasionally outside Newcastle Central station, wrapped in threadbare blankets, begging. Then there was a flash of recognition. She remembered a funeral. Her great-uncle Hector’s funeral. Hector, her grandfather’s younger brother, a mythical black sheep of whom stories had been told in whispers when she was growing up. It had been a bleak, rainy day and she’d been surrounded by strangers. She’d been sent along to represent their side of the family, because in death Hector could be forgiven. He would no longer be around to cause trouble. ‘Vera, we weren’t expecting you!’ She realized immediately that she’d let dismay creep into her voice.

He told her he was tired and didn't want any mechanical intervention. "No breathing tubes! No shocks, and no pushing on my chest. Just let me go." He was willing to try treatments that would make him feel better (comfort care), Rebecca says, such as wound care and pain management, as well as the treatments he was already getting. But, he said, "If they are giving it to me just to give it to me, then forget about it." At that point, Rebecca turned to her grandmother, who would be the ultimate decision maker should her grandfather become unable to make his own choices. "Well, darling," she said, "of course I would tell the doctors to do everything possible to keep my husband alive." Rebecca was stunned. She'd just had a lovely, candid, and specific discussion with her grandfather about his wishes. Hadn't her grandmother heard what he'd said? She then asked her grandmother to tell her what she had heard her grandfather say, and her grandmother repeated his wishes but said she loved her husband too much to let him go. "If he is with me just one more day, it would be worth it to me," she told her granddaughter. It would be worth it to her even if he were "hooked up to machines and not able to talk to me." Rebecca then turned back to her grandfather and asked, "Did you just hear what Grandma said?" He said he did. She asked how he felt about her going against his wishes and requesting a feeding tube, ventilator, shocks, and other treatments he had said he did not want. "Is that okay with you?" she asked in disbelief. Her grandfather said it was. "I am ready to go, but if it helps your grandmother to feel that she did everything possible for me, even if it is because she doesn't want me to go, that is okay. She is the one who has to go on living with her decision. If this is what she wants, then this is what I want because I love her." Rebecca realized in that moment that her grandfather's wishes were being honored; above all else, he wanted a death that his wife could live with.

Ellich Elessedil was the younger of the two brothers who had been in line for the throne many years ago and, to her mind, the one best suited to the task. But his older brother, her grandfather, was the one who had become ruler of the Elves on the death of their parents. Now her grandfather’s son, Phaedon, was the designated heir apparent and, as her grandfather continued to weaken from his chronic heart and lung problems, increasingly likely to be King soon. Aphenglow’s mother was Phaedon’s much younger sister, and her refusal to become involved in the business of the court allowed Aphenglow to remain comfortably clear of family and state politics.

I’ve always had a lifelong interest in spirit. I was an 8-year-old boy – an 8-year-old adorable little boy. I just understood my grandfather had a ‘knowingness.’ I didn’t know the word psychic then.” (during interview with Sam Liebowitz on the Conscious Consultant Hour)

I cried harder. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn't know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn't care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather's family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn't have a dad, and now I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn't fight because they were all dead, beyond killing or punishing or any kind of reckoning. At least my grandfather had been able to join the army and go fight them. What could I do?

In 2011, Freidrich Kellner's diaries from the years 1939 to 1945 were published for the first time. During the war, Friedrich Kellner was a simple judicial officer. He came from a modest background and lived in the Hessian backcountry until his death in 1970. He had no access to secret files, but simply wrote down the bits of information he overheard, gleaned from conversation with other locals and, above all, read in newspapers available to the general public. HIs diaries are evidence of what those who "had no idea" could have known about the dictatorial regime, the war and the Holocaust.

After Shivaji's death in 1680, and with the investiture of his grandson Shahu in 1708, a far-sighted Brahmin, Balaji Visvanath, emerged as his principal adviser. Impressed by his qualities of statesmanship, Shahu conferred the title of Peshwa or Prime Minister on him. Balaji not only restored the rule of law which had been in disarray since Shivaji's death but succeeded in getting the Mughal ruler in Delhi to recognize his master as the independent ruler of his grandfather Shivaji's territories. Some regard Balaji as the second founder of the Maratha Empire. After Balaji's death in 1720, a grateful Shahu – despite the resentment of Maratha nobles against growing Brahmin ascendancy – invested Balaji's son, Baji Rao, as the Peshwa. Even more ambitious and far-sighted than his father, Baji Rao decided to point the Marathas north, to the very seat of the Mughals. Their victories and territorial acquisitions shook the Mughal Empire to its foundations and when Baji Rao died in 1740, his son Balaji Baji Rao was also made Peshwa by Shahu. After Shahu's death nine years later, Balaji Baji Rao staged the ultimate coup d' état by seizing all powers himself. This was a departure from the Brahminical élite's preference for the number two position in the power hierarchy, not only because of the influence, status and wealth it brought, but, more importantly, because it enabled a versatile man, well-versed in statecraft, to exercise power without the danger or ridicule the top position attracts. Moreover, the top man is accountable for all his actions, which the man behind the throne is not.

Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar’s death would not bring back his father, Elk’s Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, “A wrong has been righted.” No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, “A people has been avenged.

All my children would be--” Hunter rolled his eyes. “Can you see me, surrounded by White Eyes?” “Ah, that is the trouble. She is a White Eyes.” Many Horses nodded and, in a teasing voice, said, “I don’t blame you there. No man could be proud of a son with white blood. He’d be weak and cowardly, a shame to any who claimed him.” Hunter froze and glanced up. The white blood in his own veins was an unspoken truth between him and his father. Never before had Many Horses alluded to it. Many Horses sniffed and rubbed the ash from his nose. “Of course, there are the rare exceptions. I suppose a man could raise a child of mixed blood and teach him to be one of the true People. It would take work, though.” The stiffness eased from Hunter’s shoulders. “Did I test your patience, my father?” Many Horses seemed to ponder that question a moment. “I found myself short on patience the time you shot me in the thigh with your first bow and arrow. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been standing behind you.” Hunter laughed softly. “You weren’t when I let fly with the arrow. If I remember, I turned around to ask you a question.” “Which I never did answer. I always thanked the Great Ones that you were only knee high. If you’d been much taller, your brothers and sister never would have been born.” He sniffed again, then grinned. “Come to think of it, Warrior was even more dangerous with his first rifle. Remember the time he accidentally fired through my lodge and shot a hole in your mother’s cooking pot? She was boiling rabbit. The water hit the fire and filled the place with so much smoke, I nearly choked to death before I got everyone outside to safety.” Hunter threw back his head and roared with laughter. “I remember you pulling that rabbit out of the pot and telling Warrior it was a perfect shot, right through the heart. Except, of course, that it was gutted. And would he practice on live targets from then on?” “Speaking of pits in plum pudding, do you remember your sister’s first attempt? Your grandfather broke off his only remaining tooth trying to eat it.” “And swallowed tooth, pit and all, so he wouldn’t embarrass her in front of Gray Horse, who had come to court her.” Hunter placed a hand over his aching midriff and sighed. “It is good I came, my father. You have the gift. Already my heart is lighter.

Did I test your patience, my father?” Many Horses seemed to ponder that question a moment. “I found myself short on patience the time you shot me in the thigh with your first bow and arrow. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been standing behind you.” Hunter laughed softly. “You weren’t when I let fly with the arrow. If I remember, I turned around to ask you a question.” “Which I never did answer. I always thanked the Great Ones that you were only knee high. If you’d been much taller, your brothers and sister never would have been born.” He sniffed again, then grinned. “Come to think of it, Warrior was even more dangerous with his first rifle. Remember the time he accidentally fired through my lodge and shot a hole in your mother’s cooking pot? She was boiling rabbit. The water hit the fire and filled the place with so much smoke, I nearly choked to death before I got everyone outside to safety.” Hunter threw back his head and roared with laughter. “I remember you pulling that rabbit out of the pot and telling Warrior it was a perfect shot, right through the heart. Except, of course, that it was gutted. And would he practice on live targets from then on?” “Speaking of pits in plum pudding, do you remember your sister’s first attempt? Your grandfather broke off his only remaining tooth trying to eat it.” “And swallowed tooth, pit and all, so he wouldn’t embarrass her in front of Gray Horse, who had come to court her.” Hunter placed a hand over his aching midriff and sighed. “It is good I came, my father. You have the gift. Already my heart is lighter.

My beloved grandson, I thank the gods for the joy of seeing your face again before I die. I wish with all my heart that you’d come back to us sooner.” Argus smiled, but made no move to approach his grandfather. “You’ll have to forgive me for staying away so long, Lord Aetes. As dearly as I love you, the idea of being put to death on my return to Aea kept me away. It’s a trivial thing, the fear of losing one’s life, but it means a lot to me.” Lord Aetes scowled. “Your father, Phrixus, was wrong to exile you, but every man has the right to rule his own family. I thought Phrixus was unjust, but I couldn’t intercede. I had a good reason.” He didn’t elaborate. “A very good one, no doubt,” Argus drawled. “Is it going to be good enough to justify executing me now that I’m back?” The king shook his head. “Your father and stepmother are both dead. Any quarrel you had with them is over. Your innocence and honor are not to be questioned by any man who owes me allegiance. All of your rights as a royal prince of Colchis are hereby restored.” “All of my rights?” Argus echoed. “You mean my stepbrother, Karos, is dead, too?” Lord Aetes didn’t answer. Argus stroked his beard. “I see. Well, won’t he be thrilled to learn that he’s going to have to share his inheritance.” “There will be peace between my grandsons,” Lord Aetes stated, gritting his teeth. “I will not have it otherwise. Did you come here to vex me, or to rejoin your family?” Argus’s laughter danced with the smoke and sparks rising from the fire pit. He strode around the hearth and embraced the king. “My apologies, Grandfather, but can you blame me for snapping? Look at the two of us. My years of exile have aged me so that we could pass for brothers!” Lord Aetes smiled and returned Argus’s hug. “That’s over now. We’ll soon have you looking your proper age.

My beloved grandson, I thank the gods for the joy of seeing your face again before I die. I wish with all my heart that you’d come back to us sooner.” Argus smiled, but made no move to approach his grandfather. “You’ll have to forgive me for staying away so long, Lord Aetes. As dearly as I love you, the idea of being put to death on my return to Aea kept me away. It’s a trivial thing, the fear of losing one’s life, but it means a lot to me.

A funeral procession, the women scream until they fall down in a faint, the men hold them up, the boys cry silently sand swear to take up arms in their father's name. It is the same funeral procession that their fathers saw, their fathers before them, and their grandfathers unto generations unknown, where the same vow was taken.

my grandfather is right, then death is only going to be a doorway from this world into Heaven. And if he's wrong, then it's simply going to be the end of my consciousness. I won't feel anything, I won't know that I'm dead, I will just come to an end.

Of all the great bodies of ancient Irish legendary lore, none other, with the possible exception of the Red Branch cycle, has had such developing, uplifting, and educational effect upon the Irish people, through the ages, as the wonderful body of Fenian tales — in both prose and verse, rich in quality and rich in quantity. Fionn MacCumail (Finn MacCool), leader of the Fian (Fenians), in the time of Cormac MacArt, is the great central figure of these tales. Fionn and the Fian were not figments of the ancient poets’ fancy — as think some who know of this lore only by hearsay. The man Fionn lived and died in the third century of the Christian Era. The Four Masters chronicle his death on the Boyne, under A. D. 283 — though he must have died some years earlier. Fionn’s father Cumal, was chief of the Fian, in his day; and his grandfather, Treun-Mor, chief before that. In contrast to the Red Branch which was of Ulster, the Fian was of Munster and Leinster origin.[19] Connaught with its Clan na Morna contributed largely to the body, later. It

Captain Joseph Frye One of the nicest parks in present day downtown Tampa, Florida, is the Cotanchobee Fort Brooke Park. The 5-acre park, which lies between the Tampa Bay Times Forum (Amalie Arena) and the mouth of the Hillsborough River at the Garrison Channel, is used for many weddings and special events such as the dragon boat races and the duck race. Few people give thought to the historic significance of the location, or to Captain Joseph Frye, considered Tampa’s first native son, who was born there on June 14, 1826. Going to sea was a tradition in the Frye family, starting with his paternal great-grandfather Samuel Frye from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, who was the master of the sloop Humbird. As a young man, Joseph attended the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the second class in 1847. Starting as an Ensign, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy until the Civil War, at which time he resigned and took a commission as a Lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. The Ten Years’ War, also known as “the Great War,” which started in 1868 became the first of three wars of Cuban Independence. In October 1873, following the defeat of the Confederacy and five years into the Cuban revolution, Frye became Captain of a side-wheeler, the S/S Virginius. His mission was to take guns and ammunition, as well as approximately 300 Cuban rebels to Cuba, with the intent of fighting the Spanish army for Cuban Independence. Unfortunately, the mission failed when the ship was intercepted by the Spanish warship Tornado. Captain Frye and his crew were taken to Santiago de Cuba and given a hasty trial and before a British warship Commander, hearing of the incident, could intervene, they were sentenced to death. After thanking the members of his crew for their service, Captain Frye and fifty-three members of his crew were put to death by firing squad, and were then decapitated and trampled upon by the Spanish soldiers. However, the British Commander Sir Lambton Lorraine of HMS Niobe did manage to save the lives of a few of the remaining crewmembers and rebels.

My grandfather has been around the block. He’s experienced love and loss. Birth and death. He’s lived through floods and storms and fires. He’s seen life move on around him. He knows what he’s talking about and every time he gives me advice like this, I have no choice but to take it.

Mooney was the class bully, a boy who had already failed two grades by the time he landed in mine. He was fat, sweaty and loud, and all the kids were scared of him. With good reason. If Mooney wanted something he took it, and woe to the child who tried to stop him. But Mooney was also crafty and sly. He never retaliated when an adult was near, preferring to ambush his prey when he could catch them off-guard, knowing it would be his word against the victims if the kid were stupid enough to tell. Sitting next to him was torture. I always carried extra pencils because I knew Mooney would confiscate the one I was using. And I considered myself lucky that pencils were all he’d taken so far. At least, I was lucky until the week before our midterm tests. Because the weather was nasty that Monday, our recess was taken in the gym. I was sitting on the bleachers taking a breather, watching Jenna chase Hugh in a game of tag, when Mooney confronted me. “You’re gonna let me copy off your paper when we take our tests next week,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll stomp you into the ground.” He swaggered off, secure in the thought that I’d comply with his demand. I watched him in shock. Cheat? He wanted me to cheat on the tests? The Judge would disown me. I would never be able to look my grandfather in the eye again. There was no way I could let Mooney copy, even knowing he would kill me when it was over. Death before dishonor was my family motto.

When I went home as a child with my mother, to South Carolina, my grandfather taught me to shoot. He was the old-fashioned kind that believes in shooting—especially where honour is concerned. My father, too, he fought several duels as a young man. He was a good swordsman. He killed a man once. That was over a woman. So you see, Monsieur Poirot”—she met his eyes squarely—“I’ve hot blood in

My grandfather left me a great deal more – a passion for literature and something additional, fundamental: the conviction that literature is important….Novels don’t contain only exceptional situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest to the most wretched….There are grown-ups who will say no, that literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are wrong. Literature informs, instructs, it prepares you for life.” (pg. 150)

It had obsessed his father and caused his death. It had briefly obsessed Pétur before he had tried to put it behind him. It had obsessed Agnar and the foreign Lord of the Rings fans, and it had obsessed Hákon. No possessed Hákon. Only his grandfather, Högni, had had the

I spent the months following my grandfather's death cycling through a purgatory of beige waiting rooms and anonymous offices (...), the object of a thousand pitying glances and knitted brows.

A wise man once said all children are born knowing what the angels look like. Once we stop fighting against death, we are able to wake up to our lives

We might say that the child is a "natural" coward: he cannot have the strength to support the terror of creation. The world as it is, creation out of the void, things as they are, things as they not, are too much for us to be able to stand. or, better: they would be too much for us to bear without crumbling in a faint, trembling like a leaf, standing in a trance in response to the movement, colors, and odors of the world. I say "would be" because most of us- by the time we leave childhood-have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience. Sometimes we may recapture this world by remembering some striking childhood perceptions, how suffused they were in emotion and wonder-how a favorite grandfather looked, or one's first love in his early teens. We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strength and directness; we can't keep gaping with our heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us. The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.

My grandfather says that to be able to laugh in the face of what you’ve done, and what you will do again, is one of the most important skills we can learn,” she said softly. “It’s why we tell tales not only of success, but also of failure, not just to learn from them, but to learn to laugh at death.

We can’t afford another disaster like the early ‘90’s screw-up at Waco. My investors wouldn’t be too pleased since it would end up being a PR disaster for us, and we can’t have that. Better to rid ourselves of those religious freaks slowly, nobody’ll notice the small churches and their old folks missing if we start with them first. David, you should also get the Health Administration to finally round up all of those old people in healthcare facilities who don’t contribute to our society and are nothing but eaters. Didn’t some moron in the opposition refer to it as ‘Death Panels’ a couple decades ago?” Collins caught the reference, laughed, and said, “Yeah, and the media buried her for saying it. Too bad I was too young to appreciate the supposed next savior of the Conservative moment being destroyed. Your grandfather did an excellent job,

you should also get the Health Administration to finally round up all of those old people in healthcare facilities who don’t contribute to our society and are nothing but eaters. Didn’t some moron in the opposition refer to it as ‘Death Panels’ a couple decades ago?” Collins caught the reference, laughed, and said, “Yeah, and the media buried her for saying it. Too bad I was too young to appreciate the supposed next savior of the Conservative moment being destroyed. Your grandfather did an excellent job,

Last night, I dreamt of the number seven. I know from your writings that seven is the number of El and shows His perfection. You, Grandfather, are seventh from Adam, and walk closer to El than anyone, and may not even suffer the pain of mortal death.” He nodded. “Continue, child.” “If you are seventh, then your son, Methuselah, is number eight. Does not eight represent new beginning?” “Indeed.

He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side, I was told that, 100 years ago, the taxidermist's grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a sabre, and the other, apparently, was disarmed with one. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist's grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers that may have still been twitching, and likely thought: Well, it's not like it's doing him any good.

What point was there otherwise to the suffering he had gone through? What point to his grandfather’s death on the very night before his operation? It was a warning, a cautionary call that life was short, too short to be wasted.

There was no point in living in fear of death, or questioning the reason for my existence because as far as I knew, I was not in complete control of my life, nor can any other person be.

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.1 Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were. What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Day after day Moses went to Zuriel, soaking up the stories of his ancestors. Zuriel’s body was frail, but his mind was still alert, and he remembered the stories in great detail. His old eyes were faded, but they glowed as he spoke of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Moses sat still as a stone, listening intently as Zuriel spoke of Jacob’s death. “He was not as good a man as his grandfather Abraham,” old Zuriel said, nodding his head constantly. “But he was a crafty fellow. He had twelve sons, and his twelve sons became the twelve tribes of Israel.” He looked over at Moses and smiled toothlessly. “We know you are of the tribe of Levi, one of those sons.

I have defeat tattooed in my DNA. My great-uncle was shot dead. My grandfather was given the death sentence and spent five years in jail. My grandmothers suffered the humiliation of those defeated in the Civil War. My father was put in jail. My mother was politically active in the underground. It bothers me enormously to lose, I can’t stand it. And I’ve spent many years, with some friends, devoting almost all of our political activity to thinking about how we can win.

He stared out of the window, looking blank for a moment, the way he did when he thought about his grand-father. "I read once that there are three ways to protect yourself from the fear of death. One is repression, forgetting that death is approaching and acting like it doesn't exist, which is how most of us live. The second is never forgetting about it, living every day like it's the last day of your life. The last is acceptance: people who truly accept death aren't afraid of anything. You feel peaceful even when you're at the point of losing everything. But do you know what the three approaches have in common?" I shook my head. It would be easier to just keel over and die rather than worry about this. "They're all lies. They all are manifestations of fear." "Then what's true?" "Fear itself, I guess. That's the most honest emotion.

I think it’s an old stud.” “Like your grandfather?” “Ha! Funny!

So, share the beautiful memories that you created with your parents. Talk to your family members about what a loving and joyous mother or father you had. Tell your children about their grandmother or grandfather. Keep her alive in your memories and heart through conversations. It might be painful to reminisce her memories initially, but with time, it will only bring a smile to your face. The pain will slowly start to fade as you realize that remembering her is one of the ways to keep her next to you as you move forward with life.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that went them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

We are never ready.” Noah laced her fingers in his and gently pulled her toward the house. “We all knew my grandfather wouldn’t last long, and yet when he was gone, we weren’t ready to lose him. My dad went suddenly, so we sure weren’t ready. I remember thinking at the time that it didn’t matter if we had weeks to prepare for a loved one’s death or no time at all. We could never be ready no matter how hard we try or even think we are.

I’m sorry, Grandfather. I’m sorry that this is how it ends for you. I’m sorry that your last words were not ones said surrounded by family and friends. I’m sorry that you died alone in hospice and that you left the world without anyone by your side. I know that it’s too late, but we are here. And whether you can or can’t see us, you were our grandfather and we’ll always love you,” Noah finished.

Josie, you were my first grandchild. There was so much that I wanted to do right by you. I had so many hopes and dreams for you that I never got to share. I know that it was my fault. I was the one who created a toxic environment, causing your parents to alienate you from me. But it’s my dying wish that you please find it in your heart to forgive me for not being the grandfather you deserved.

Fred had refused to heed his lawyers’ advice to cede control of his empire to his children before his death in order to minimize estate taxes. That meant that Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert would be responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of estate taxes. In addition to dozens of buildings, my grandfather had amassed extraordinary sums of cash. His properties carried no debt and brought in millions of dollars every year. The siblings’ solution was to establish All County Building Supply & Maintenance.

At Mull, he continues, "Here are some persons who can repeat several of the Celtic poems of Ossian and other bards. The schoolmaster told me he could repeat a very long one on the death of Oscar, which was taught him by his grandfather.

How do we make peace with beloved ones who become ghosts? The secret is to understand that our relationship with them has not ended even though they are gone. If haunting is possible in death, then healing is possible, too. The dance is endless: The circle of listening goes on even after death when their voice becomes internal to us. The moment I get quiet enough to listen, I can hear my grandfather’s voice humming inside me, and I can feel his love, the sweet labor that nourished me through childhood and sustained us even through the years when we could not understand each other, the love that returned us to each other on his deathbed and is returning me to him even now—love that outlasts life.

It wasn’t until the music came to a complete halt, and out on the dance floor a couple of the waitresses came carrying a black plaque with Amir written on it and right behind a massive bottle of champagne. Everyone around the table was dancing and completely oblivious to the extravaganza taking place in front of them. One of the waiters popped the bottle open and started to pour glasses for everyone. Tara took one but she felt a little guilty. The black plaque with Amir’s name eerily reminded her of the same black plaque they carry at funerals in Iran. It reminded her of her grandfather’s passing. They carry the card to ensure all family members see you in the chaos that is the cemetery. And here, she thought to herself, how different can one world be for two groups? One group frolic around, draped in luxury to celebrate life and the other, wail in black, to mourn death.

All Hadza women dig, but grandmothers dig more than mothers in part because they don’t have to nurse or spend as much time taking care of little ones. According to measurements by Kristen Hawkes and colleagues, a typical Hadza mother forages about four hours a day, but grandmothers forage on average five to six hours a day.18 On some days they dig less and spend more time collecting berries, but overall they work longer hours than mothers do. And just as grandmothers spend about seven hours every day foraging and preparing food, grandfathers continue to hunt and to collect honey and baobab fruits, traveling just as far on most days as younger men do. According to the anthropologist Frank Marlowe, “Old men are the most likely to fall out of tall baobab trees to their deaths, since they continue to try to collect honey into old age.”19 How many elderly Americans dig several hours a day, let alone climb trees and hunt animals on foot? We can, however, compare how much Americans and Hadza walk. A study of thousands found that the average twenty-first-century woman in the United States aged eighteen to forty walks 5,756 steps a day (about two to three miles), but this number declines precipitously with age, and by the time they are in their seventies, American women take roughly half as many steps. While Americans are half as active in their seventies as in their forties, Hadza women walk twice as much per day as Americans, with only modest declines as they age.20 In addition, heart rate monitors showed that elderly Hadza women actually spent more of their day engaged in moderate to vigorous activity than younger women who were still having children.21 Imagine if elderly American women had to walk five miles a day to shop for their children and grandchildren, and instead of pulling items off the shelves, they had to dig for several hours in hard, rocky soil for boxes of cereal, frozen peas, and Fruit Roll-Ups. Not surprisingly, hard work keeps elderly hunter-gatherers fit. One of the most reliable measures of age-related fitness is walking speed—a measure that correlates strongly with life expectancy.22 The average American woman under fifty walks about three feet per second (0.92 meter per second) but slows down considerably to two feet per second (0.67 meter per second) by her sixties.23 Thanks to an active lifestyle without retirement, there is no significant age-related decline in walking speed among Hadza women, whose average pace remains a brisk 3.6 feet per second (1.1 meters per second) well into their seventies.24 Having struggled to keep up with elderly Hadza grandmas, I can attest they maintain a steady clip even when it is blisteringly hot. Older Hadza men also walk briskly.

Be The Love Commandment (A Sonnet) Instead of worrying about a fictitious judgment day, Make your actual today a real nonjudgment day. Instead of hoping for a fictitious heaven after death, Make this world that you have an abode without hate. Plenty of heart force we have wasted on fiction, Plenty of attention we have placed on insecurity. Now it's time to redirect our time and priorities, It is time to be the valiant vanguards of reality. I ain’t talkin’ about being chained to the reality, Nor about keeping things the way they are for so long. All I'm asking is, we pay attention to the now and here, Instead of obsessing over tales from days long gone. So, stand up to the tyrants as apocalypse incarnate. Reach out to the needy as a living love commandment.

Death comes for us all in the end, and we kind of just have to accept that in order to cope through life until we ultimately kick the bucket ourselves. Not like denying the human condition will keep the reaper at bay, after all. Then once you're gone, any traces of you ever having been alive will slowly fade away and be swallowed by the sands of time. With very, very few exceptions, every single person alive today will be long forgotten even just 200 years from now. That's what my grandfather's death made me realize.

My grandfather died in a bombing, and my father was gunned down by an enemy. One day my time will come, and I can only hope my death will be quick.

In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request. “Tell my wife,” he answered in a well-modulated voice, “to give the girl the name of Úrsula.” He paused and said it again: “Úrsula, like her grandmother. And tell her also that if the child that is to be born is a boy, they should name him José Arcadio, not for his uncle, but for his grandfather.” Before they took him to the execution wall Father Nicanor tried to attend him. “I have nothing to repent,” Arcadio said, and he put himself under the orders of the squad after drinking a cup of black coffee.

The first thing you notice about the New Testament is how intensely contemporary it feels. The Old Testament is mythic and teeming with monsters and death, like hearing your great-grandfather describe what it was like to ride woolly mammoths.

The Tiger King’s Gift Long ago, in the days of the ancient Pandya kings of South India, a father and his two sons lived in a village near Madura. The father was an astrologer, but he had never become famous, and so was very poor. The elder son was called Chellan; the younger Gangan. When the time came for the father to put off his earthly body, he gave his few fields to Chellan, and a palm leaf with some words scratched on it to Gangan. These were the words that Gangan read: ‘From birth, poverty; For ten years, captivity; On the seashore, death. For a little while happiness shall follow.’ ‘This must be my fortune,’ said Gangan to himself, ‘and it doesn’t seem to be much of a fortune. I must have done something terrible in a former birth. But I will go as a pilgrim to Papanasam and do penance. If I can expiate my sin, I may have better luck.’ His only possession was a water jar of hammered copper, which had belonged to his grandfather. He coiled a rope round the jar, in case he needed to draw water from a well. Then he put a little rice into a bundle, said farewell to his brother, and set out. As he journeyed, he had to pass through a great forest. Soon he had eaten all his food and drunk all the water in his jar. In the heat of the day he became very thirsty. At last he came to an old, disused well. As he looked down into it, he could see that a winding stairway had once gone round it down to the water’s edge, and that there had been four landing places at different heights down this stairway, so that those who wanted to fetch water might descend the stairway to the level of the water and fill their water pots with ease, regardless of whether the well was full, or three-quarters full, or half full or only one-quarter full. Now the well was nearly empty. The stairway had fallen away. Gangan could not go down to fill his water jar so he uncoiled his rope, tied his jar to it and slowly let it down. To his amazement, as it was going down past the first landing place, a huge striped paw shot out and caught it, and a growling voice called out: ‘Oh Lord of Charity, have mercy! The stair is fallen. I die unless you save me! Fear me not.

But my parents who died in the fire, they...they were part of a noble family in England. The family has always owned the Rockford Manor in Oxfordshire, which is a mansion that includes acres of land, plus a local village where people live and farm---" "Wait, noble? Do you mean like royalty?" Zoey interrupts, her eyes wide. "No, no. But in England there's a system called the peerage---dukes and duchesses, earls and countesses---and they're ranked just below royalty. My dad was the younger son of the Duke of Wickersham, which made him a lord and my mom a lady." Carole and Keith sit frozen, listening to me with a look of dread in their eyes. "So what does that make you?" Zoey asks breathlessly. "Well, when my parents were alive, it meant that I was treated a certain way just because I was part of this family of dukes and duchesses. But then after the fire, the line of succession changed---everything changed. My first cousin, Lucia, became next in line to inherit Rockford Manor and the title. So she would have been the Duchess of Wickersham." I swallow hard. "But she died in an accident last year---which I didn't even know about until today." My hands shake as I speak, and I can't look at Keith and Carole, unable to grasp how they could have kept this from me. "That's awful! But what does it mean for you?" Zoey presses. "Her death left me next in line after my grandfather. And he passed away last month---which I was also unaware of." This time I'm able to look at Carole and Keith, shooting them a withering glare. Zoey's mouth hangs open. "That means you're...you're a...?" "Yeah. You're looking at the new Duchess of Wickersham and owner of Rockford Manor.

By contrast, everybody I know grew up with school shootings. We’re the first bunch who came up knowing for an absolute, stone-certain fact that at any moment, somebody could walk into the cafeteria and execute us. It wasn’t a vague, formless idea or an abstract possibility, it was real. Every time we saw another school get hit, it was like, Well, I guess I’m next. No disrespect to my grandfather, who was actually a pretty nice guy, but seeing news reports about kids your own age getting their faces blown off on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis changes you and how you look at death. It’s there with us every day. As terrible as this is going to sound, we’re used to it, and we try not to be scared by it.

Now I will tell you a true thing, child, and if you are wise you will remember it. The soul, it longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul. But if you would be happy all your days, as I was with your grandfather, subdue the body and marry the soul.