Skip to main content

Goethe

One of the most useful tidbits I picked up from grief counseling was a simple insight from evolutionary psychology. Througout history, it was perfectly ordinary to lose half your children. We are built to endure this. It’s not exactly a pleasant thought, but a necessary one. Being reminded of it helped.

I recall turning on the TV and being repelled by some loud, violent show. I turned the channel to a PBS station where they were showing what appeared to be a comfortably bland documentary about Goethe. And then I got blindsided. Just like that, he lost four out of his five children. Time to turn the channel again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A ChatGPT AI prompt

Haven't written here for quite a while. I snapped a photo today, and had an idea for something I’d be more interested in reading than writing. It's phrased as an API prompt. Write a children’s story for adults, about a bunch of books in a town's mini-library box. All the books are unwanted cast-offs, and they all want to have someone take them in and read them, and hopefully keep them, much as a child in an orphanage wants to be adopted. All the books are anthropomorphized, and have ongoing conversations with each other, as humans do. All the books talk to each other in the same voice as their authors. So, one book is by Dan Brown. Whatever that book says as dialog reads like a sentence in a Dan Brown novel. Another book is a romance novel by Danielle Steel. One book is Class, Race, and Gender , by Michael Zweig. One book is about how to get teams at work to better collaborate. One book is a volume of cute poems about cats. One is by a Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Homily

This is the homily delivered by Fr. Austin Fleming at the funeral mass for Aidan McHale Sierra, Holy Family Parish Church in Concord MA, August 15, 2017: Since last week I’ve been reflecting on what I might preach this morning. And I’ve been thinking about to whom I would address my homily: to Ellen and Mike, Aidan’s loving mother and father? to Isabel, Aidan’s doting big sister? perhaps to Aidan’s young friends and their families? Everyone here today loves Aidan, but each of us in our own way, To whom might I speak, then — without leaving anyone out? Well, I decided to resolve that dilemma by preaching to the one person we all would love to talk to today. I want to speak to Aidan — and so I’ve written him a letter which I want to share with you. Dear Aidan, You’ve left a lot of people behind, people who love you — the very people whose love you knew so well. But, oh my, Aidan: you’ve left us with a lot o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How I mostly stopped flinching

Around ten months after we lost Aidan, I was continuing to have trouble controlling my flinching from the trauma. I would see something or think of something, then flinch. A quick shake of the head, like a sudden shiver. Not very often at work, but mostly during idle moments during meetings when I wasn’t engaged in some other immediate task. It was not recounting the traumatic events of losing him that triggered me. It was little memories, the accumulation of tiny details. Simple things, like the color orange, his favorite, and how he said it was his favorite even though it was also my favorite, and I reminded him he could have whatever favorite color he wants. I thought about how my brain was reacting to these memories. Why did they make me flinch? I actually talked with Aidan about it. What do you think is going on? (These conversations happen a lot when you grieve.) I realized it was as if the feelings they stirred up had no place to go. They felt all bottled up, and my fl...
Post a Comment
Read more