Death | The future we seldom speak of

Griefwalker is a documentary by director Tim Wilson about the work of Stephen Jenkinson, for years the leader of a palliative care counseling team at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Through his work in “the death trade,” as he calls it, Jenkinson has presided at the deathbed of more than 1,000 people where, too often, he witnessed a “wretched anxiety and an existential terror” even when there was no pain. As […]

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Bill Arnott | Death of a boy, a father, a friend

Burial of a Boy in 1979 Black, dreamless sky plummeting rain twelve-year-old me pulled from two a.m. sleep dad at my bed. Sobbing (but dad never cries) My best friend killed on our rural road, struck by a driver, he slogged through downpour, woke dad confessed to spaniel slaughter disappeared in deluge Through dark sheets of wet dad gathers the fur snapped lump carries it/her home, digs a hole with […]

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Anna Cates | Selected poems

THE EMPTY URN how large the moons seems sinking low on the horizon as if weighted by all our sorrow to ride the mountain’s back voiceless silhouette like Quasimodo the hump lasts only a minute then lets go surrendering to dusk how strange our twilight beginnings and final demise ending in the same apothecary blues flecked with stars we open with a flower’s softness take the rain harden like an […]

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Kim Brookes | Ways to the end

According to family lore, I will follow my elders into a long life. When I was born, I had three great-grandmothers, each of whom lived into her nineties. My grandmother passed away when she was one hundred years old. Until she fell, when she was ninety eight, my Nana had a clear mind, still drove a bit, and lived alone. Unable to get at-home services in rural Maine, within months, […]

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