• Personal Reflections

    The Turning Point on the
    (Hopefully) Long Journey Home

    August 14, 2021 - By 

    You reach a point in life—I’m not sure when it began but I know it has—that your people—friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, teammates— who have died begin to rival in number, and feel as present to you, as those who are still living. This represents some kind of turning point no one ever alluded to in my formative years, when they suggested all the exciting things awaiting me in my maturity. No one ever took me aside back then in a candid moment and intoned, “All they’re saying is true, but at a certain point, you will also begin to…

  • Personal Reflections - Psychology

    Outliving Ernest Becker and
    “The Denial of Death”

    October 21, 2018 - By 

    In his 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work “The Denial of Death,” cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wove together major threads of psychology, philosophy, anthropology and religion in positing that the central motivating force of human life is the fear of death, which compels us to live in its denial. We do so by not thinking or talking about it much, by drinking and drugging too much, sleepwalking through life as if it were giving us all the time in the world, embracing eternal life doctrines of religion, and by pursuing any number of immortality-seeking “hero” projects in our jobs, sports, the military, hobbies, and private obsessions. (Climbing Everest,…

  • General Nonfiction

    Onwards to 2016 With “Gratitude” for Oliver Sacks

    December 30, 2015 - By 

    Every passing year sees the passing of more people from our lives. Whether from death, ruptured or merely faded relationship, or the loss of the person we once knew because dementia has robbed him or her of that cherished personhood, we come to the final days of a year and amid our looks back, as joyous as some of them might be, we are also reminded of loss. As an additional reminder, news programs highlight the more prominent people who have died, displaying a list of names and faces as the year’s final credits roll. Among those names this year,…

  • Personal Reflections

    Catapulted Back to Life: A Thanks Giving

    November 27, 2013 - By 

    It has been exactly 19,531 days since I flew through the air across a motel pool, did a flip and landed on the concrete, fracturing my skull, losing most all that day from my memory, and getting rushed to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles by my frantic parents, my dad driving and my mom slapping me across the cheek to try to keep me awake while en route. Those slaps are one of the only two images that managed to stay with me of that day. The other is of walking through an alley on the way home, my late and…