Over at Testzone, jf has been doing some beautiful and bittersweet writing about her parents' aging, and a related issue, death. When I have written about wondering whether it is good or bad to be introspective and self-conscious, this is one important part of the consideration. I read jf's entry and asked, "How do we learn to navigate between the paralysis of a depressing awareness and the freedom of a shallow denial?"

I did a lot of reading on the subject when I was a teenager; recently I unpacked a box of books that had long been in storage, and there were Life After Life, On Death and Dying, The Evidence for Life After Death, and Death Be Not Proud, among others. More recently I read the supremely comforting Embraced by the Light. In college I took the anthropology of death, and music and death. And my connection to the past, to history and genealogy, to cemeteries, objects and records, is related.

Of course I've done some writing on the subject; from Gully Brook Press there's Compost Pile, and my tributes Bus Ride (privately printed), Howie and Penny at Dogstar and Sirius (or go to Sirius' memorial webpage from the Port Authority).