death Archives - Longreads

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers

A lesson on loss, love, and raising chickens.

“‘Chris is dead.’ Just like that, I was empty.”

“Henry Wismayer lost his dad to cancer at the age of four. He thinks through the ways it has shaped his life.”

“The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs.”

Being able to prepare for death is a complicated luxury.

“Speaking to the dead can, for a short while, seem to place us outside the laws of nature—outside the rules governing time and space.”

On sisterhood, addiction, and family ghosts.

“Two lives bound into one story by immigration and illness.”

“My death occurred while playing beer-league hockey at the Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton, Oregon.”

“Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die.”