Intro:

I’m a Chicago born, suburban raised, Catholic boy from a large family and many neighbors. Sustained interests in religion, psychology and poetry carried me through my formative years as a reader haunting bookstores for hours, looking for that right title or the perfect choice among too many to fit my meager means. With a growing library — and giving away most of my books three times over on separate decades — despite the jobs families marriages and moves, one constant remains and that is reading. The joy of a well-constructed sentence and a clear thought that opens the imagination is my heaven on earth. It is part of my lifetime Awakening: our common purpose. To share some of these discoveries with you is the joyful magic of internet community, my mission here.

I happen to be a hospice nurse now, hitting my stride professionally and personally, so I make this job the constructive or organizing form around these posts. It’s incidental what I and you do and also that we die, but our mortality is also significant beyond comprehension and that which giving meaning to our lives. Until we actually go through with dying — and then it’s ordinary again. So few seem to know what they’re doing when dying happens, thinking: It’s a test for God’s sake, or Where is my bucket list now, or Where is that social worker’s check list of necessary tasks to be done during-this-significant-time, etc.. So that’s another good reason to talk about living and dying.

This is not so much a nuts and bolts version of hospice nursing. And there will be no poetry of the Hallmark stamp, no fecking sunsets, hand-holding, butterflies or lavender. I don’t tell detailed personal stories, or give away people’s identity here. Most of the sick, dying and dead are ordinary people that we can identify with, even the famous ones who sicken and die like the rest of us (although monied jerks usually live longer). I’m not a tourist (and try to understand and not exploit those I witness), and neither should you be one. Don’t read here for what you might expect but for what you don’t expect — if you like the writing style — because life and death is full of the unexpected. I’m rife with contradictions, blind spots, prejudices and trapped within a limited lived experience of relative priveledge that I’m trying to better observe and be more honest about. That’s some of my credo, aesthetic & ethics.

I hope you enjoy what you read here.