death
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Death Rituals and Grief Rituals
Death is messy and time-consuming and exhausting for the survivors. Death is confusing and maddening. At Blunderbuss Magazine, Essay Liu, a Taiwanese writer, documents her father’s death and the rituals in the days following. Translated by Kevin Tang. Day three,…
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Fatal Short Stories
Depictions of death in short stories can challenge even seasoned writers. John McDonough, writing in the Colorado Review, explains why: The immediacy of the death of a loved one offers rich emotional possibilities, but ones that are remarkably complicated. Mine…
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Antonia Crane, The Dirty Dozenth
And this is precisely why I was so entirely blown away by Antonia Crane’s new memoir, Spent, which chronicles her dark and twisted path through the above horrors with remarkable elegance and restraint.
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Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
When my father died my mother was still alive. And I think when your second parent dies, there is that shock: “Oh man, I’m an orphan.” There’s also this relief: It’s done; it’s finished; it’s over. Because I had felt…
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WANTED: DEATH LAMENT
the dog born March 30th who I will find 6 months from now to know what it’s like to hurl myself down the mountain for the wind to blow right through me
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On Dying, from the Heart
Over at The Weeklings, find an excerpt from Sean Murphy’s book Please Talk about Me When I’m Gone: A Memoir of My Mother. You learn not to talk to the stars, or you eventually realize it’s senseless to hope they…
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I Know Death Too Well By Now
In a breathtaking essay on aging, Roger Angell reflects on death. At the age of 93, he writes: “A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it.” Angell has…
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Icefalls
It seemed like nature might be offering up something fraught with emotion, a beautiful image that a writer could imbue with heartbreaking symbolism. But I couldn’t come up with anything. It was just fall, and so the leaves were red.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Box Girl
“I spent hours standing before the glass vitrine, trying to divine the magic, the answer, the power of the box.” Lizi Gilad debuts on The Rumpus with a powerful poetic homage and meditation on permanence.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
We’ve had a busy couple weekends at the Rumpus lately, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed any of the spectacular essays and book reviews we’ve been posting. For example, this weekend we reviewed Bradley L. Garrett’s urban-exploration treatise Explore…
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A Different Type of Grieving
Rumpus contributor Melissa Chadburn has a heartbreaking and beautiful essay at Buzzfeed about how she is learning to grieve for her nephew who was stillborn and how to use that process going forward: “I’m reminded of a gospel that personifies Death:…
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This Man Is Not My Father
I’m sitting across from the man who looks exactly like my father would look if my father had lived to be fifty-seven. If my father hadn’t died sixteen years ago when I was thirteen. But he did.