You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Death.”
Hare Krishna Tree, Tompkins Square Park ----------------------------------------------- On Labor Day weekend 2021, I give my body to the ticks that live in the tall grass underneath the Hare Krishna tree and think, not freshly, of dying. It is the first clear morning in New York since the previous Saturday. Hurricane Ida has been steadily barreling through the Northeast and, after [...]
What is it about anniversaries? Is it that the earth is again in the same place relative to the sun, and that we are occupying the same spot in the cosmos? You were here, but differently. Something has changed from when you were at this position before: you got married; planes hit the twin towers; you stopped smoking. The sameness [...]
Apartment 6 is on the third floor, so I guess that’s why I don’t notice the odor. But I have been wondering why suddenly my super has put lavender scented Air Wick stick-ups all over the hallway walls. I also notice urinal cakes have been stuck under the staircase near my apartment door on the first floor. Their harsh disinfectant [...]
As the wheels hit the ground and the pilot stopped the airplane at Newark airport, I felt right at home. I was landing in the city that was going to be my new home, at least for a couple of years. People had always told me that I should live in New York once, but leave before the city made me [...]
I was on an evening Metro North train home from the Adirondacks. Catherine and I were taking turns sucking Merlot out of a plastic nozzle attached to a plastic sack. We were each lying down long ways across a row of seats, facing each other, passing the bag back and forth, lifting our heads only to drink. We had, in [...]
I am writing this on the laptop you stole from me. Remember? No of course you don’t. What an asshole you were! I had gone back to New York to visit my father at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Head Trauma Unit (he had fallen and bashed his brains in on the way to see Sondheim and I swore up and down [...]
Martin Able had most people fooled. The 94-year-old retired history professor prided himself on owning the very latest smartphone. For the past five years he upgraded annually. His latest could shoot video in slow motion and download music with the touch of his thumbprint. The phone even included an app that could call the rescue squad if his blood pressure [...]
I was on the 2 Express uptown on my way home after work. It was about 6:30 pm. We straphangers who were standing were packed in like sardines. As the train pulled into the 79th Street station, there was a sound, a whooshing of air, a release. It felt as though the power had been cut. We came to a [...]
A sinkhole is threatening to swallow up 79th Street in Bay Ridge. Police, fire, city workers are on the scene. Supposedly, the sewers had something to do with it.“The beginning of the end,” laments a longstanding neighborhood resident on local TV. He is wearing a trucker hat and gold chain and undershirt. Behind him, elders in lawn chairs spit husks [...]
Larry Polshansky, dead. I cannot believe this. He wasn’t that much older than my husband, Gregory, who died of melanoma at age 56, five years ago. Larry chain-smoked, I remember. Maybe it was lung cancer that got him. I am walking my two dogs, Sophie, an eager-to-please golden retriever, and Henry Longfellow, a less-than-eager-to-please piebald dachshund, in Central Park just [...]
On the first Wednesday of every month for the past year, my walk east from Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue where I teach, to the corner of Eighteenth Street and First Avenue took about twenty minutes. There are intriguing neighborhood changes along the way but I was usually lost in thought. I would arrive at my destination, Beth Israel's Karpas [...]
When the previous resident of my apartment, who was still living in it when my girlfriend and I viewed it for the first time, told us that the funeral home downstairs hardly ever held services, the effect on me was less than palliative. Jenna nodded thoughtfully in the way real estate shoppers are prone, apparently already aware of the macabre [...]
We suspected it was illegal, but we had no choice. At the vet’s office in Park Slope, they told us cat cremation cost $125, and neither my boyfriend nor I had the money. Besides, cremation seemed too formal, too clinical, for Jed. He was always escaping out the window, taking self-guided tours of the neighborhood after nightfall. He was an [...]
I’m holding the door open for Mr. 11A and his dog, but when he sees the Medical Examiner’s van and the police car parked in front of the building, he stops, leans in close to me, and asks in a stage whisper, “Do they suspect foul play?” I tell him that the police had only been waiting for someone from [...]
I always woke up early the last day of school. My eyes would jump open and I’d sit up and look toward the windows in my parents’ bedroom to see if morning slid through the thick wooden blinds and thin white curtains. I’d jab the bottom of the bunk bed above where my older brother Johnny slept. Hey wake up, [...]
The sidewalk in front of my apartment building was wrapped in crime tape. An ambulance waited idly on East 10th Street. Policemen strode in and out of the lobby. It was a mild winter Saturday afternoon, and I’d come downstairs for my mail. My doorman looked ashen. “A woman jumped,” he said. “18G.” He was the second person to see [...]
As a teenager, I lived with my dysfunctional family in a modest but comfortable apartment in Beechurst, Queens. One Saturday morning, too fried to suffer any longer the slings and arrows of my sorry-assed teenage life, I decided to run away from home. I told my mother I was going into Manhattan to spend the day at the New York [...]
