Death and Dying
Mother Knew Best
After my mother died three years ago (see “Spare Every Expense, Except One,” October 10, 2008), my sister Lucy kept discovering interesting things she had left...
Clouds of Unknowing
Growing up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one knew that tornadoes weren’t just things that happened to other people. This disquieting knowledge came in the form of regular...
A Kind of Justice
“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama told the world in announcing that U.S. commandos had raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden,...
A Death to Celebrate?
During the Middle Ages—the historical context for the rise of what would come to be known as the “just war” tradition—violence under any circumstance was deemed a...
Channeling History
If you’re a fan of the History Channel, you’ll feel right at home watching Robert Redford’s recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s murder near the beginning of The...
Pass the Cudgel
We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s...
Trading Places
Jane Gross’s book on caring for aging parents is both an invaluable guide and a terrifying read, a book that tells you things that you didn’t even know you didn’t...
Self-destruct Sequence
According to Ron Rosenbaum, when the Cold War ended—and especially after September 11 raised the specter of a nuclear attack by terrorists—people “succumbed to a...
Kashima & the Catfish
The apartment building in Chiba where my wife Keiko and I have spent most of our adult lives and where our four children grew up looks across the bay to Tokyo and...
Lightening the Load
Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air: and so shall we be always with the Lord. —1...
Hallowed Ground
While visiting my sister Mary and her husband recently in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I saw a beautiful cemetery and asked Mary to pull the car over so I could take...
Fetal Positions
Americans living in the mid-nineteenth century knew almost nothing about the human fetus, at least in a biological sense. Prior to a mother’s perception of fetal...
