Jimmy Breslin died today. He wrote A Death in Emergency Room One, one of the finest pieces of journalism perhaps ever written. I read it for the first time ages ago, and it is just as powerful still. If you’ve never read it, take a few minutes and consume this timeless article on the events that occurred on November 22, 1963.
Posts tagged “death”
Negative Space
A beautiful poem
There’s no use in regret. You can’t change anything.
Your mother died unhappy with the way you turned
out. You and your father were not on speaking terms
when he died, and you left your wife for no good
reason. Well, it’s past. You may as well regret missing
out on the conquest of Mexico. That would have been
just your kind of thing back when you were eighteen:
a bunch of murderous Spaniards, out to destroy a
culture and get rich. On the other hand, the Aztecs
were no great shakes either. It’s hard to know whom
to root for in this situation. The Aztecs thought they
had to sacrifice lots of people to keep the sun coming
up every day. And it worked. The sun rose every day.
But it was backbreaking labor, all that sacrificing.
The priests had to call in the royal family to help,
and their neighbors, the gardener, the cooks… You
can see how this is going to end. You are going to
have your bloody, beating heart ripped out, but you
are going to have to stand in line, in the hot sun, for
hours, waiting your turn.
by Louis Jenkins, from Tin Flag: New and Selected Prose Poems
Another Anniversary
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
“You stopped breathing once when you were five weeks old. Did I ever tell you that?”
No, she certainly hadn’t.
“I was about to take a bath and then I thought I’d better check the crib, so I went in and you weren’t moving at all. I thought you were dead. I snatched you up and tore out of the house to the Jensens’ and pounded on the door, and right then you let out a cry. Anyway, we took you to the doctor.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think it was a seizure. I guess it was just one of those things that happens sometimes.” Then she got up to make a salad for supper.
That’s how Mother told stories. Never enough detail, and she always left you hanging at the end. If she had gone ahead and run the bath water, I’d be dead right now. And it was “just one of those things that happens sometimes”? I felt a little weak myself. I had gotten over the fear that I’d stop breathing during the night, all those years I used to remind myself to breathe, and now this. So I wasn’t dumb to think that your breath could stop at any time. It could happen right now, sitting on a white kitchen chair in a cool breeze and drinking iced tea. Fall over dead on the linoleum. Thirteen years old, dead.
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days
How Not to Say the Wrong Thing: The Ring Theory of Kvetching
Kathleen A. Gagne
My mom died one year ago today. It simultaneously feels like it was only yesterday and like it was a thousand years ago. I miss her so much that there is an actual ache in my heart. She died much too young. It was undeserved and unfair and unjust and I still rage inside that
Runaway
One of my favorite memories of my mom — of my entire childhood, actually — is singing Runaway by Del Shannon in the car with her and my little sister while driving to St. Paul’s Catholic elementary school. I love that song. She loved that song. She loved singing that song. Mom loved music. And
The Horizon Is a Beltway
On losing my mother