Comments on: You are going to die

By: Daphne Gray-Grant

Daphne Gray-Grant — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:17:00 +0000

In reply to Dave Carlson. It's good to have end-of-life conversations if you can. My own mother died five years ago, following a massive heart attack. Fortunately, she was able to hang on about four months, giving her five children lots of time for conversations. It was difficult but I really treasure that time.

By: Dave Carlson

Dave Carlson — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:35:00 +0000

My current-read is “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”. Here is an author I may emulate only in spirit, not style. Wonderful creative writing, but he was radical. He deliberately chose not to follow conventions of poetic style, punctuation, and spelling.

My mother said in here diary in 1940, about eloping with my father to get married at the Little Brown Church in Iowa, “No conventions were broken.”

Here is a line from Blake, “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, published in 1793. Commentator Harold Bloom, at the back of the book, calls this “A hymn to free love”.

“I cry, Love! Love! Love!, happy happy Love! free as a mountain wind!”

If you have seen the current movie “Les Miserables, the rest of Blake’s “Visions” are that miserable. Who knew that those conditions persisted for another hundred years? Blake was a prophet in that respect, as the poems that follow, “America” and “Europe” predict.

By: Dave Carlson

Dave Carlson — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:18:00 +0000

End-of-life conversations have become routine in my family. and among close friends. I am still working on Highlights of 2012, which has become a major contribution to my memoirs. My top highlight for the year was a visit in the home of my cousin in Neenah, Wisconsin, a short walk from Lake Winnebago. She is the oldest daughter of my mother’s oldest brother, and now the owner of his original Green Bay Packer’s season tickets. She and her husband both have life-threatening health problems, but they took a day to drive us along the back roads of Door County. They are ten years older than I am. We covered a lot of memories, unknown to either of us, because her father moved six hours east of the family homestead in the 1930’s. (Now it is a three hour drive on a good highway). It was a different kind of estrangement, not a dysfunction. Other visits included older friends whose memories are stuck in a circle around twenty years ago. That’s another theme for my writings, “Pictures of My Mind”, including creative practices to work around memory loss.