The nightfall of my son’s passing was more than a dark sky devoid of moon and stars. Both above and beneath me, it seemed there was only darkness, the night above and the abyss below.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.
And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
– Fredrich Nietzsche
Epigram 146, Beyond Good and Evil
Filed under Life or Something Like It, Parenting
Saturday began just as it always did. The beginning of yet another weekend, a mundane day of relaxed obligation. Morning coffee with my wife. Beer and pub food with a friend or two. The anticipation of a casual get-together for a cooking competition that had become a monthly tradition with the men of my life. Men whose friendships I counted not in years, but decades. Continue reading
Filed under Life or Something Like It, Parenting
The hubris of men knows no bounds. A naïve sense that we are masters of our own time and space.
We, the fortunate among us, think that our own life experience is some kind of normalized humanity and we behave as though this is how life has always been and how it always will be. We pay lip service to the suffering of the past and of others but find it difficult to imagine that we, ourselves, could experience such suffering—as though the suffering is some work of fiction wrought by authors of vivid imagination. Continue reading
Filed under Life or Something Like It, Parenting
