Kirsten Hotchkiss It’s a little unsettling to receive a note in Linked In or a Friend request on Facebook from someone whom I know passed away several months or even years ago. Although a warm memory might come to mind, there’s nothing else I can do but wonder how many other graves there are in the digital …
Besides the fact that this is our wedding song (it wasn’t until many years after that we learned it was a spiritual song), and a really lovely tune, its message is powerful: the importance of telling people how much you love them cannot be overstated. Read the lyrics here. In an interview on 60 Minutes …
Unfortunately, the only rites of passage that we elders know much more about are funerals. We attend them too frequently. If humor’s a part of these essays, what’s so funny about death? Of course, we are depressed, unless we are just attending to be seen. Or because we have to, not wish to. Many of …
Sunday mornings are my trip through the New York Times. Our local paper actually prints the pages, and I go to the national news section to read the obits. To be sure I am not inadvertently there. The paid ones are on the right-hand side. I look at the photos and invariably there will be …
To die: to sleep: No more; and, by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. Hamlet, Act III, scene 1, line 60. He gave his honours to the world again, His blessed part to heaven, and slept …
“The undertaker, Winthrop Ogletree, was waiting in the foyer of the large, rambling Victorian house at the end of the Street of Tides where he practiced his trade. . . . “I’ll get right to the point, Winthrop,” my grandmother said officiously. “I’ll be dying sometime after my sixtieth birthday and I don’t want to …