Found in a random lot of postcards. Who is this for? What is the reason? Where did it come from? Also “when” and “why”?
Post-card. Pre-death.
Author: cwirka
Death doula. Amateur at everything.
The Angel of Death Victorious
From the Lake View Cemetery in Ohio – in case you’re looking for inspiration for that metal album you’ve been meaning to record.
A Dying Art
The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, recently passed away at 80. His piece, The Art of Dying, was published in 2019. The title does not do justice to all the heart and feeling within the essay.
Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.
Peter Schjeldahl
The Optical Delusion
The realizations that came to Einstein from science are life-affirming. This quote from a letter he wrote to a grieving friend is beautiful:
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
February, 1950
As published in The Quantum and the Lotus
Widening our circles of compassion. Worth a shot.
Death Becomes You 