Grandparents Death Quotes

History has shown us time and time again that you don't have to know someone to love them with all your heart.

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.

Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.

The day my mother died I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil. From that moment on, the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.

The first time I died, I didn't see God. No light at the end of the tunnel. No haloed angels. No dead grandparents. To be fair, I probably wasn't a solid shoo-in for Heaven. But, honestly, I kind of assumed I'd make the cut.

That night, the Raka conspirators had plenty of news to report, particularly Ochobu. Aly had not known that the mages of the Chain had been laboring to eliminate any mages who had worked magic on the Crown’s behalf. So far they had killed seven of the most powerful. Chelaol would call this count of the dead another ‘good start,’ Aly thought grimly. This crude business of counting up lives taken struck her as a bad idea. It took the horror from death. When Ochobu named four mages on Lombyn who had had been killed in the streets of their towns, it had been about numbers, not lives. Maybe this is how you become a Rittevon, she thought. You get used to the dead being described as numbers, not fathers or daughters or grandparents. She turned to Dove when Ochobu finished, 'don’t ever be like this,' she urged. 'don’t think that it doesn’t matter if you only hear of murder as a number. If you keep it at a distance.

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

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is not the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb. Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t. It’s easier to see when we take it out of the intensely personal: stubbing your toe hurts. It totally hurts. For a moment, the pain can be all-consuming. You might even hobble for a while. Having your foot ripped off by a passing freight train hurts, too. Differently. The pain lasts longer. The injury needs recovery time, which may be uncertain or complicated. It affects and impacts your life moving forward. You can’t go back to the life you had before you became a one-footed person. No one would say these two injuries are exactly the same.

Randy [Rhoads] was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.

You can’t know what it is like for us now—you will always be one step behind. Be thankful for that. You can’t know what it was like for us then—you will always be one step ahead. Be thankful for that, too. Trust us: There is a nearly perfect balance between the past and the future. As we become the distant past, you become a future few of us would have imagined. It’s hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away. We are a spirit-burden you carry, like that of your grandparents, or the friends from your childhood who at some point moved away. We try to make it as light a burden as possible. And at the same time, when we see you, we cannot help but think of ourselves. We were once the ones who were dreaming and loving and screwing. We were once the ones who were living, and then we were the ones who were dying. We sewed ourselves, a thread’s width, into your history. We were once like you, only our world wasn’t like yours. You have no idea how close to death you came. A generation or two earlier, you might be here with us. We resent you. You astonish us.

Until tonight , she thought death was for grandparents and goldfish.

For years, all we do is feed. We don’t control what our parents feed us for dinner, we don’t control what they read to us (or don’t read to us) or what they let us watch. We are like jars of wet clay, and we are loaded full with every kind of tale—films; books; TV shows; stories from friends, parents, grandparents. And as we dry, we take the shape of what has been dumped inside of us.

If things went according to death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish and self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it.

Birth and death are really illusions. There really is no beginning and there is no end. Before this life, we were alive in our parents and before that we were alive in our grandparents and our ancestors. One thing gets passed on to another. One form changes to another.

We envy people who are extremely old because we wish to live that long, not because we want to be that old.

People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end. Nicholas knows all this; he has cleaned house after his dead parents and grandparents, made all the terrible discoveries that only death affords. How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker to be dropped off just down the road. p199

Does God exist? Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said. At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience—and that was no small achievement—Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion. In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists. If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here. To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: “God knows the past, the present, and the future.” In that case, he had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and he would not be shocked by her actions. Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.

I didn't have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn't have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn't have backup. I didn't have insurance to cover a loss like this.

Our great-grandparents were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes or cabbages; our children are likely to be told that those who have passed on... are changed into flowers, or lie at rest in lovely gardens.

You can’t know what it is like for us now—you will always be one step behind. Be thankful for that. You can’t know what it was like for us then—you will always be one step ahead. Be thankful for that, too. Trust us: There is a nearly perfect balance between the past and the future. As we become the distant past, you become a future few of us would have imagined. It’s hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away. We are a spirit-burden you carry, like that of your grandparents, or the friends from your childhood who at some point moved away. We try to make it as light a burden as possible. And at the same time, when we see you, we cannot help but think of ourselves. We were once the ones who were dreaming and loving and screwing. We were once the ones who were living, and then we were the ones who were dying. We sewed ourselves, a thread’s width, into your history. We were once like you, only our world wasn’t like yours. You have no idea how close to death you came. A generation or two earlier, you might be here with us. We resent you. You astonish us.

The dominant way we deal with death in our culture is religious. And our religious culture deals with death by pretending it isn’t real. Religion deals with death by pretending it isn’t permanent; by pretending that the loss of the ones we love is just like a long vacation apart; by pretending that our dead loved ones are still hanging around somehow, like the dead grandparents in a “Family Circus” cartoon; by pretending that our own death is just a one-way trip to a different place. Our religious culture deals with death by putting it on the back burner, by encouraging people to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time. I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

Even nowadays, children are often left at home during funerals, like dogs. Why should children be excluded from funerals when they’re so welcome at christenings and weddings? Not only can their presence be therapeutic for other adults and useful reminders that life, whatever death may do, goes on; not only is it unlikely that very young children will be upset, simply because they have only a vague idea of the concept of death. But not attending the funeral of someone close can be tremendously damaging for some people in later life. Middle-aged people who were not allowed to attend the funerals of grandparents or even parents, can still feel full of rage and sorrow.

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon’s army circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops, watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it in Pity the Nation: They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every alleyway, there were corpses—women, young men, babies and grandparents—lying together in lazy and terrible profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave. Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves. Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the top of the tower block to the west, we could see them staring at us through field-glasses, scanning back and forth across the streets of corpses, the lenses of the binoculars sometimes flashing in the sun as their gaze ranged through the camp. Loren Jenkins [of the Washington Post] cursed a lot. Jenkins immediately realized that the Israeli defense minister would have to bear some responsibility for this horror. “Sharon!” he shouted. “That fucker [Ariel] Sharon! This is Deir Yassin all over again.

When a loving person dies, God sends angels to escort them on their journey to heaven. Angels are the messengers of God. They could be relatives or friends, but they will be exactly the right persons who represent God’s love to the individual. The persons you long for, who have gone to heaven before you, will be waiting for you when you die. They will be ready to comfort you and escort you to heaven. They will take you from the reality of this physical universe and transport you to a new reality where you get your first introduction to the wonder and power of God. There are as many entry points into heaven as there are individuals. Each person is escorted toward heaven according to his or her life, culture, and spiritual level. One person may be in a beautiful field, another may be in a magnificent castle, another in a setting similar to their grandparents’ home. God and the angels, for the specific comfort and beginning edification of that person, individually create each setting. It is difficult for us to understand and believe how much God cares about and respects our individuality. The angel guardians begin the process of explaining to the person that they have left the world and are beginning life. Everything behind was preparation for real life. What we call death is actually being born into a new life beyond our imagination. We will grow and be transformed. We will meet the personification of God, and eventually we will come before the very presence of God.

Given the choice between bedlam and a dictatorship, what do you think the American people will choose? Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they'll do the terrorists' work for them. They'll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud , the the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women's equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Angle-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

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?

Your grandparents always told me, Make a useful life. I don't feel I've really done that, but I can make a useful death... - My life has been determined so much by accidents, it seems nice that now an "accident on purpose" will make things right again. A happy accident.

Within the biblical worldview (which has not so much been disproved as ignored in much modern thought), heaven and earth overlap, and do so at certain specific times and places, Jesus and the Spirit being the key markers. In the same way, at certain places and moments God's future and God's past (that is, events like Jesus's death and resurrection) arrive in the present--rather as though you were to sit down to a meal and discover your great-great-grandparents, and also your great-great-grandchildren, turning up to join you. That's how God's time works.

Why do I know I exist if I also know I will not? Why was I given access to logical space and the mathematical structure of the world? Just to lose them when my body is destroyed? Why do I wake up in the night with the thought that I will die, why do I sit up, drenched in sweat, and scream and slap myself and try to suppress the thought that I will disappear for all eternity, that I will never be again, to the end of time? Why will the world end with me? We age: we stand quietly in line with those condemned to death. We are executed one after the other in a sinister extermination camp. We are first stripped of our beauty, youth, and hope. We are next wrapped in the penitential robe of illness, weariness, and decay. Our grandparents die, our parents are executed in front of us, and suddenly time gets short, you suddenly see your reflection in the axeblade. And only then do you realize you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person that you see coming out of the factory gates in a Mélies film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead. That we all come into this world from a frightening abyss without our memories, that we suffer unimaginably on a speck of dust, and that we then perish, all in a nanosecond, as though we had never lived, as though we had never been.

Still, as a kid, History Repeats Itself terrified me, mostly because I was a God-fearing child. And I mean that literally. God scared me stiff, what with the turning human beings into salt and getting them swallowed up by whales, plus the locusts and famines and, not least, making sure his own kid gets nailed to death onto wood. Every time someone would die — a cousin or grandparent or Elvis — some relative preacher would there-there it away by saying that God has a plan, and we simply have no way of knowing what that plan is. But we did know. We learned about His plan every week at Sunday school. It’s called Armageddon!

Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they’ll do the terrorists’ work for them. They’ll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud, the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women’s equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Anglo-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

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.

[S]he made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.

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.

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.

Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term. And yes, the transgressive element of dissection had certainly decreased from the bad old days. (Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers—that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a means once common enough to warrant its own verb: burke, which the OED defines as “to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection.”) Yet the best-informed people—doctors—almost never donated their bodies. How informed were the donors, then? As one anatomy professor put it to me, “You wouldn’t tell a patient the gory details of a surgery if that would make them not consent.” Even if donors were informed enough—and they might well have been, notwithstanding one anatomy professor’s hedging—it wasn’t so much the thought of being dissected that galled. It was the thought of your mother, your father, your grandparents being hacked to pieces by wisecracking twenty-two-year-old medical students. Every time I read the pre-lab and saw a term like “bone saw,” I wondered if this would be the session in which I finally vomited. Yet I was rarely troubled in lab, even when I found that the “bone saw” in question was nothing more than a common, rusty wood saw. The closest I ever came to vomiting was nowhere near the lab but on a visit to my grandmother’s grave in New York, on the twentieth anniversary of her death. I found myself doubled over, almost crying, and apologizing—not to my cadaver but to my cadaver’s grandchildren. In the midst of our lab, in fact, a son requested his mother’s half-dissected body back. Yes, she had consented, but he couldn’t live with that. I knew I’d do the same. (The remains were returned.) In

Every day that we live, we must address new truths that pertain to life and death. Each incremental decade in the hayride of life incites us to address a newfangled realism. By age ten, the weepy passing of pets or grandparents, the death of sitting or past presidents, or the demise of other notable figures, obliges us to address the fact that no one including our parents and siblings will live forever. Cognition of each person’s fickle mortality spurs an awaking in our ken, which newly grasped knowledge is sure to cause a ray of resentment for humankind’s lack of immortality, especially if the people who a person cares deeply about fail to sanctify their body with nourishing and purifying habits.

I also took care of a four year-old that was in the dying process. Both of his parents were already dead. His maternal grandparents were caring for him. In the weeks before he died he told everyone he was taking a trip, that he was going to live with his “parents.” In the hours before his death, he began looking around the room as if searching for something or someone. We asked him what he was doing, and he told us he was looking for his mother. It was as if the room was filled with people we couldn’t see. Just before he died, he raised his arm, pointed to the corner of his room and called his mother by name. He stayed focused on that corner until his last breath. You can’t convince me his mother wasn’t there to help him make the change from this world to the next. We do not die alone!

The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.

Hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live to be old: their most common age of death is between sixty-eight and seventy-two, and most become grandparents or even great-grandparents.70 They most likely die from gastrointestinal or respiratory infections, diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis, or from violence and accidents.71 Health surveys also indicate that most of the noninfectious diseases that kill or disable older people in developed nations are rare or unknown among middle-aged and elderly hunter-gatherers.72 These admittedly limited studies have found that hunter-gatherers rarely if ever get type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, breast cancer, asthma, and liver disease. They also don’t appear to suffer much from gout, myopia, cavities, hearing loss, collapsed arches, and other common ailments. To be sure, hunter-gatherers don’t live in perpetually perfect health, especially since tobacco and alcohol have become increasingly available to them, but the evidence suggests that they are healthy compared to many older Americans today despite never having received any medical care. In short, if you were to compare contemporary health data from people around the world with equivalent data from hunter-gatherers, you would not conclude that rising rates of common mismatch diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes are straightforward, inevitable by-products of economic progress and increased longevity. Moreover,

lay there fresh and raw from having been carved open to bring her granddaughter into the world—the past ran me down. I had a vision like the kind people describe when they’re near death. For one brief second, it was as if a curtain had been lifted. I saw a long line of people, faceless in the distance, familiar as they got closer: my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents. I was at the front of this row of human dominoes, my infant in my arms, and as my forefathers and -mothers toppled behind me, they pushed the next generation into motion. There was no escape; their collective weight would crush me and my baby. I had started out as an egg inside Malabar, just as she had begun as an egg inside Vivian, and so on, each of our fates charted from the depths of our mothers. What little I knew about my grandparents and great-grandparents had been constructed around a sturdy fact or two, embellished perhaps by a shy smile in a grainy photograph or an underlined sentence in a book or letter. The specifics of their lives would remain unknown to me, as mine would be to the baby I held. But our collective history would shape my daughter, and there was something noxious in our matrilineal line. Malabar was the only mother I had, but she was not the mother I wanted to be. Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along this inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it. She would grow up to be beautiful and smart and agile, as I used to be, as her grandparents were, as her great-grandparents were before them. Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

Saturday morning Eli called Max at the Mayflower Hotel, where we were residing, and told him that Father had died in the morning hours. Of course, we returned home on Saturday and on Sunday, May 6, 1948 was Father's funeral. He had been so interested in the deliberations at the U.N., before the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, which occurred on May 15, 1948, about nine days after his death. Father was buried on the Stadler family plot, on Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, where my Mother's parents (my grandparents) and her brothers rest in peace. Mother survived Father by 23 years; she was laid to rest, next to him, in 1971.

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.

Thanks to “The Trial”, Kafka bequeathed to us at least two concept words that have become indispensable for understanding the modern world: tribunal and trial. He bequeathed them to us: meaning that he put them at our disposal, for us to use, consider, and reconsider in terms of our own experiences. Tribunal: this does not signify the juridical institution intended for punishing people who have violated the laws of a state; the tribunal (or court) in Kafka's sense is a power that judges, that judges because it is a power; its power and nothing but its power is what confers legitimacy on the tribunal; when the two intruders enter his room, K. immediately recognizes that power, and he submits. The trial brought by the tribunal is always absolute; meaning that it does not concern an isolated act, a specific crime (theft, fraud, rape), but rather concerns the character of the accused in its entirety: K. searches for his offense in "the most minute events" of his whole life; in our century, by this standard, Bezukhov would have been indicted for both his love and his hatred of Napoleon. And also for his drunkennness, since, being absolute, the trial concerns private life as well as public; Brod condemned K. to death for seeing in women only the "lowest sexuality”;… The trial is absolute as well in that it does not keep within the limits of the defendant's life; thus K.s uncle says: "Do you want to lose this trial? ... It means that you will be absolutely ruined. And all your relatives along with you." The guilt of one Jew contains within it that of the Jews of all times; the Communist doctrine on the influence of class origin includes within the offense of the accused the offense of his parents and grandparents; in the trial of Europe for the crime of colonialism, Sartre accused not the colonists but Europe, all of Europe, the Europe of all times; because "there is a colonist in each of us," because "being a man here means being an accomplice since we have all profited from colonial exploitation." The spirit of the trial recognizes no statute of limitations; the distant past is as alive as today's event; and even in death you will not escape: there are informers in the cemetery. The trial's memory is colossal, but it is a very specific memory, which could be defined as the forgetting of everything not a crime.

An hour later, a group of men from the funeral home arrived. With my grandfather's help, they cleaned my grandmother's body and marinated it in rice alcohol. When the wine had straightened her limbs, which had stiffened from rigor mortis, they dressed her in new clothes. Using a thick red thread, they tied her two big toes together to prevent her spirit from wandering. A cheap red lacquered coffin was brought into my grandparents' bedroom. A layer of sand was spread at the bottom to cushion the body. Rich families would use tea leaves instead of sand. The more expensive the tea, the richer and higher in status the dead were. We covered the sand with coarse, loosely woven cotton gauze. After my grandmother's body was laid inside the coffin, a small dish filled with burning oil was placed on the ground beneath it to keep her spirit warm. Incense in a large urn perfumed the air. It was time for friends and relatives to pay their respects.

For years, all we do is feed. We don’t control what our parents feed us for dinner, we don’t control what they read to us (or don’t read to us) or what they let us watch. We are like jars of wet clay, and we are loaded full with every kind of tale—films; books; TV shows; stories from friends, parents, grandparents. And as we dry, we take the shape of what has been dumped inside of us. When we begin to make our own choices, when we become an active character in our own narratives, all of that soul food is behind us. We might not even remember the stories, but they groomed and molded us while we were still unfired clay.

As I stood there in the first hour of the night, what I felt most was the connection between the deaths of Andrew and my grandparents, between my life and Andrew's crash. The sky and the events in my life were not a web of inevitable synchronicities. It was easier for me to believe in these fluke alignments than to decide on the trajectory of my life. As I tried to force logic together, the center pushed itself apart.

As I stood there in the first hour of the night, what I felt most was the connection between the deaths of Andrew and my grandparents, between my life and Andrew's crash. The sky and the events in my life were not a web of inevitable synchronicities. It was easier for me to believe in these fluke alignments than to decide on the trajectory of my life. As I tried to force logic together, the center pushed itself apart.

Stupid dog, do you realize you have actually LITERALLY bitten the hand that feeds you?" Schatzi looks at me with a withering stare, arching her bushy eyebrows haughtily, and then turns her back to me. I stick out my tongue at her back, and go to the kitchen to freshen her water bowl. Damnable creature requires fresh water a zillion times a day. God forbid a fleck of dust is dancing on the surface, or it has gone two degrees beyond cool, I get the laser look of death. Once there was a dead fly in it, and she looked in the bowl, crossed the room, looked me dead in the eye, and squatted and peed on my shoes. I usually call her Shitzi or Nazi. I suppose I'm lucky she deigns to drink tap water. Our bare tolerance of each other is mutual, and affection between us is nil. The haughty little hellbeast was my sole inheritance from my grandmother who passed away two years ago. A cold, exacting woman who raised me in my mother's near-complete absence, Annelyn Stroudt insisted on my calling her Grand-mère, despite the fact that she put the manic in Germanic, ancestry-wise. But apparently when her grandparents schlepped here mother from Berlin to Chicago, they took a year in Paris first, and adopted many things Française. So Grand-mère it was. Grand-mère Annelyn also insisted on dressing for dinner, formal manners in every situation, letterpress stationary, and physical affection saved for the endless string of purebred miniature schnauzers she bought one after the other, and never offered to the granddaughter who also lived under her roof. Her clear disappointment in me must have rubbed off on Schatzi, who, despite having lived with me since Grand-mère died neatly and quietly in her sleep at the respectable age of eighty-nine, has never seen me as anything but a source of food, and a firm hand at the end of the leash. She dotes on Grant, but he sneaks her nibbles when he cooks, and coos to her in flawless French. Sometimes I wonder if the spirit of Grand-mère transferred into the dog upon death, and if the chilly indifference to me is just a manifestation of my grandmother's continued disapproval from beyond the grave. Schatzi wanders over to her bowl, sniffs it, sneers at me one last time for good measure, shakes her head to ensure her ears are in place, like a society matron checking her coif, and settles down to drink.

International Socialist Review Issue 24, July–August 2002 Stephen Jay Gould: Dialectical Biologist by Phil Gasper Every major newspaper carried an obituary of Gould after his death, praising his scientific accomplishments. But most said nothing about another important aspect of Gould’s life–his radical politics. Gould was a red diaper baby. His maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants who worked in Manhattan’s garment sweatshops in the early years of the last century, just blocks from the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 workers in 1911. "I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrant garment workers," Gould wrote, "and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning)…set their views and helped to define their futures."4 Gould’s parents were New York leftists, probably in or around the Communist Party in the 1930s, and he once boasted that he had learned his Marxism "literally at [my] daddy’s knee.

The dusty facts are that; Ferdinand II, the Regent of Castile, was 63 years old when he died on January 23, 1516; his wife Queen Isabella was 53 years old when she died on November 26, 1504; and Columbus had passed away almost 10 years prior on May 20, 1506. The earlier death of Isabella and the death of her children changed the normal succession of heirs, forcing Ferdinand to yield the government of Castile to Philip of Habsburg, the husband of his second daughter Joanna. The son of Joanna and her husband Philip I of Castile was Charles I, who would inherit Spain from his maternal grandparents as well as the Habsburg and Burgundian Empires of his paternal family. Thus, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella became the most powerful ruler in Europe and by 1516 King Charles I of Spain also ruled the Netherlands. In 1519 as Charles V, he became the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, King of Germany, as well as the King of Italy.

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.

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.

Absent all speculation, the contemplation on everything known and unknown, there’s always an invitation to listen. We could even cease the meaning-making and surrender to the mystery. Be willing to feel the grief, not just for our own losses but for the big losses throughout time. We could exhale heartbreak for the death of mothers and children, grandparents and lovers, tribes and democracies. The crack of falling redwoods and splitting glaciers, the disappearance of the monarchs and the mourning of the giant tortoise. The landslides, the floods, the fires. We could feel the destruction of mountains, comets, galaxies. All the losses without redemption. All that has been broken. And in that silence between breaths we could pause. We could acknowledge… absence. In the liminal space we could feel the emptiness. Behold the big, spacious silence behind all noise. And there, right there, at the edges or perhaps smack in the middle of our awareness we might feel a fullness. The nearness of something sacred, the quiet presence which can’t be captured in words—only felt. That which is deeply personal and undeniably universal, that which is me and yet everything not-me, that nearness some people call Source, God, the Great Mother, the Great Perfection, that which can’t be named. And as we inhale, we can breathe in all of it, the richness of seas, the quiet dignity of deserts, the opalescent sheen of babies just born. The melody of a downpour and the clarion birdsong as the earth begins to dry. The warm symphonies of stars and the roar of everyone laughing at once. All the beauty beyond description. The truth that everything terrible exists alongside everything miraculous, that loss gives way for finding, and through it all, only love keeps us fighting for what’s right.

Soldiers are glorified in the Tranquiline Halls. But without farmers, soldiers can’t eat – so being a farmer is probably all right too. Better yourself with a Calling in life. But don’t get too ambitious or we’ll lock you away. Don’t get revenge upon the king for ordering the death of your grandparents. But do get revenge on the Parshendi for ordering the death of someone you never met.

Police conducted regular spot checks around midnight to make sure nobody had unauthorized visitors. One had to carry at all times a “citizen’s certificate,” a twelve-page passport-size booklet that contained a wealth of information about the bearer. It was modeled on the old Soviet ID. All that changed with the famine. Without food distribution, there was no reason to stay at your fixed address. If sitting still meant you starved to death, no threat the regime levied could keep people home. For the first time, North Koreans were wandering around their own country with impunity. Among the homeless population, a disproportionate number were children or teenagers. In some cases, their parents had gone off in search of jobs or food. But there was another, even stranger, explanation. Facing a food shortage, many North Korean families conducted a brutal triage of their own households—they denied themselves and often elderly grandparents food in order to keep the younger generation alive. That strategy produced an unusual number of orphans, as the children were often the last ones left of entire families that had perished. The kochebi, the wandering swallows

The classroom was too tidy. I missed the texture of the weather, the smell of cooking, the jostle of shoulders and elbows on a crowded sidewalk. In the congregation, by contrast, everything was going on at once, random, unscheduled, accompanied too much of the time by undisciplined and trivializing small talk. Babies born squalling, people dying neglected, and in between the parenthesis of birth and death, lifetimes of ambiguity: adolescents making an unholy mess of growing up and their parents muddling through as guilty bystanders. Also, of course, heroic holiness, stunningly beautiful prayers, sacrificial love surfacing from the tangled emotions in a difficult family, a song in the night, glimpses of glory, the sullen betrayal of a bored spouse quietly redeemed from years of self-imprisoned self-worship by forgiveness and grace: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And all of this mixed together. In this world, sin was not a word defined in a lexicon. Salvation was not a reference traced down in a concordance. Every act of sin and every event of salvation involved a personal name in a grammar of imperatives and promises in a messy community of friends and neighbors, parents and grandparents, none of whom fit a stereotype.

I am impressed by how glibly most mortals confront the debilitation of the body. Patton. Your grandparents. Many others. They just accept it. I have always feared aging. The inevitability of it haunts me. Ever since I abandoned the pond, the prospect of death has been a menacing shadow in the back of my mind.

with Mark, it will be me.” Jack could have pushed back, but nothing in Tucker’s voice even hinted that the matter was up for debate. “Then we’ll need two days for prep.” “That’s fine.” The extra day was to talk him out of it, not to prep. But Jack let it be for now. “All right, then. See you Wednesday morning.” CHAPTER 15 At 10:00 a.m. Friday morning, Mark Towson was seated at the end of a long rectangular table in Peabody Hall. His father was at his side. They were in one of the oldest buildings on campus, a restored redbrick gem in the heart of the university’s historic district. Peabody was originally Teacher’s College, and it was still home to the College of Education when Mark’s great grandparents had met at the University of Florida. It was now the Office of the Dean of Students, including Student Conduct & Conflict Resolution—the site of Mark’s disciplinary hearing. “Just try to relax,” his father said. They were alone in a room that was much smaller than Mark had expected. Lying awake all night, he’d envisioned something on the order

The survival of an older person is of no evolutionary consequence since that person can no longer reproduce—unless one wants to argue for the role of grandparents in prolonging the lives of their descendants. It might even, in a Darwinian sense, be better to remove the elderly before they can use up any more resources that might otherwise go to the young. In that case, you could say that there is something almost altruistic about the diseases of aging. Just as programmed cell death, apoptosis, cleanly eliminates damaged cells from the body, so do the diseases of aging clear up the clutter of biologically useless older people—only not quite so cleanly. And this perspective may be particularly attractive at a time, like now, when the dominant discourse on aging focuses on the deleterious economic effects of largely aging populations. If we didn’t have inflammatory diseases to get the job done, we might have to turn to euthanasia.

People who haven’t lost anyone think that to speak of grief is to summon it. People who haven’t grappled with their own mortality think that to speak of death is to make it real. And in my teens and twenties, most of my friends had never buried anybody who wasn’t a grandparent or a dog. So nobody asked after my father. Nobody asked after me. And sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment.

Why can’t the last part of life be the best one? Yes, we see elderly parents and grandparents dealing with the pain and difficulties of aging. But if the physical pain can be managed, who’s to say this can’t be the most spiritually and intellectually rich time of our lives? Isn’t it arrogant to presume it can’t be? Once,

Imagine hearing on CNN that yesterday yet another American town was wiped out by the “Reds.” (Let’s leave the precise identity of the enemy unspecified.) All men were killed, women raped and then also slain, and those children who were not slaughtered immediately were instead carried away to be sold on the organ black market. Or that the Reds again tortured a U.S. serviceman to death, videotaped it, and showed it repeatedly on the Al Reddiyyah channel. Or perhaps an interview with a ransomed captive about her horrible experiences at the hands of the Reds. You would hear a story of this kind once a week throughout your life; and the same state of affairs was in place when your parents and grandparents grew up. Without doubt, any society subjected to such pressures for generations would be transformed.

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?

could have sworn that she saw the tip of Douglas’s tail wag. She left Bomber to his odious sister and tripped downstairs into the bright afternoon sunshine. The last thing she heard as she closed the door behind her was from Portia, in an altogether changed, but still unpleasant, wheedling tone: ‘Now, darling, when are you going to publish my book?’ At the corner of Great Russell Street she stopped for a moment, remembering the man she had smiled at. She hoped that the person he was meeting hadn’t left him waiting for too long. Just then, in amongst the dust and dirt at her feet, the glint of gold and glass caught her eye. She stooped down, rescued the small, round object from the gutter and slipped it safely into her pocket. Chapter 4 It was always the same. Looking down and never turning his face to the sky, he searched the pavements and gutters. His back burned and his eyes watered, full of grit and tears. And then he fell; back through the black into the damp and twisted sheets of his own bed. The dream was always the same. Endlessly searching and never finding the one thing that would finally bring him peace. The house was filled with the deep, soft darkness of a summer night. Anthony swung his weary legs out of bed and sat shrugging the stubborn scraps of dream from his head. He would have to get up. Sleep would not return tonight. He padded down the stairs, their creaking wood echoing his aching bones. No light was needed until he reached the kitchen. He made a pot of tea, finding more comfort in the making than the drinking, and took it through to the study. Pale moonlight skimmed across the edges of the shelves and pooled in the centre of the mahogany table. High on a shelf in the corner, the gold lid of the biscuit tin winked at him as he crossed the room. He took it down carefully and set it in the shimmering circle of light on the table. Of all the things that he had ever found, this troubled him the most. Because it was not a ‘something’ but a ‘someone’; of that he was unreasonably sure. Once again, he removed the lid and inspected the contents, as he had done every day for the past week since bringing it home. He had already repositioned the tin in the study several times, placing it higher up or hidden from sight, but its draw remained irresistible. He couldn’t leave it alone. He dipped his hand into the tin and gently rolled the coarse, grey grains across his fingertips. The memory swept through him, snatching his breath and winding him as surely as any punch to the gut. Once again, he was holding death in his hands. The life they could have had together was a self-harming fantasy in which Anthony rarely indulged. They might have been grandparents by now. Therese had never spoken about wanting children, but then they had both assumed that they had

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[11] Were

In intense quietness, Catherine stole through the open door opposite Aunt Hannah's door, and hid herself beneath her grandparents' bed. She was no longer crying. She only wanted never to be seen by anybody again. She lay on her side and stared down into the grim grain of the carpet. When Aunt Hannah's door opened she felt such terror that she gasped, and drew her knees up tight against her chest. When the voices began calling her, downstairs, she made herself even smaller, and when she heard their feet on the stairs and the rising concern in their voices she began to tremble all over. But by the time she heard them along the hallway she was out from under the bed and sitting on its edge, her back to them as they came in, her heart knocking her breath to pieces.

Sitting on his floor with his back against the mattress, he cried for the first time in years. Not so much for the deaths of his grandparents, but at the thought of a man who knew he wouldn’t need a suitcase anymore.

Ariely’s book clearly gives empirical verification for what you and I know happens all the time. Here is a tiny example I hope you cannot relate to: Ariely says, “Over the course of many years of teaching, I have noticed that there typically seems to be a rash of deaths among students’ relatives at the end of the semester. It happens mostly in the week before final exams and before papers are due.” Guess which relative most often dies? Grandma. I am not making this stuff up. Mike Adams, a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, has done research on this. He has shown that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. Worse, grandmothers of students who are not doing well in class are at even higher risk. Students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose Grandma than nonfailing students. It turns out that the greatest predictor of mortality among senior citizens in our day ends up being their grandchildren’s GPAs. The moral of all this is, if you are a grandparent, do not let your grandchild go to college. It’ll kill you, especially if he or she is intellectually challenged.

Growing up, I loved to throw pebbles into the lake near my grandparents’ cottage. The pebble hit the water with a loud splash and ripples would fan out from the point of impact. The water would shift and change through the ripples. It would never be the same as it had been before the pebble hit. To me, loss and grief are much like those pebbles, the water, and the ripples. A death or other loss occurs and strikes the waters of your life with a resounding splash. From that moment, your life is changed in a multitude of ways – painful, jarring, challenging, and ultimately, often transformative ways.