Tag Archives: death and dying

Shadowlands: A Play

Posted on November 22, 2025 by smellincoffee

C.S. Lewis died on 11/22/63, a week before his 65th birthday. Over the years, I have taken up the habit of spending “a week with Jack” — reading something of his in that space, to spend time with an author … Continue reading →

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The Dead Beat

Posted on October 16, 2024 by smellincoffee

Searching for obituaries is the most frequent kind of local history request I field at the library, and I like to joke when I’m disappearing into the archives room that I’m off hunting for dead people. I’ve noticed over the … Continue reading →

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Over my Dead Body: American Cemeteries

Posted on October 12, 2024 by smellincoffee

“There is glory in graves; there is grandeur in gloom”. So begins a poem inscribed on an elaborate tombstone in my favorite cemetery, Selma’s own Old Live Oak. Perhaps it was growing up in a city with such a picturesque … Continue reading →

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Anxious People

Posted on March 19, 2024 by smellincoffee

The scene: an apartment showing, the day before New Year’s. The apartment is filled with people, and then enters one more: a masked individual wielding a gun, panicked. They’ve just tried to rob a bank, only the bank is a … Continue reading →

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The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Posted on January 20, 2024 by smellincoffee

A.J. Fikry is a widower with a bookstore and an increasingly serious drinking problem. (He’s not an alcoholic, he says, he just drinks to the point of passing out at least once a week.) The one bright spot: he has Tamerlane, … Continue reading →

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A Man Called Ove

Posted on June 26, 2023 by smellincoffee

A Man Called Ove© 2012 Fredrik Backman368 pages Ove is a simple man. He likes to wake early, patrol the neighborhood and look for trouble, take care of what needs fixing, grouse about people not doing things properly, and then … Continue reading →

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Of Cicero and base-ball

Posted on May 5, 2023 by smellincoffee

This week I’ve been finishing up a couple of audiobooks. The first is How to Grow Old, a short one by Cicero written during the early part of his retirement from Rome, before the odious Mark Anthony sent men to … Continue reading →

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Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Posted on April 25, 2023 by smellincoffee

Will the Circle Be Unbroken? A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna be Ok© 2020 Sean Dietrich261 pages A memoir about a boy growing up in the deep shadow cast by his father’s suicide has no right to be … Continue reading →

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The Incredible Winston Browne

Posted on January 23, 2023 by smellincoffee

The Incredible Winston Browne© Sean Dietrich 2021 352 pages In a little place called Moab,  a man is dying. His name is Winston Browne, and he’s a man who lives with regrets, memories of a love gone awry, of an … Continue reading →

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Letters to an American Lady

Posted on July 5, 2022 by smellincoffee

Letters to an American Lady(c) 1967 C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper150 pages I was pleased recently to discover that Letters to an American Lady, a collection of letters from C.S. Lewis written to an anonymous southern woman in the 1950s … Continue reading →

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