New York Times

The widow wanted the cherry coffin. All she could think of was her husband, dead. Dead at 40 in the dead of winter; dead in the front yard of a Sunday morning with the ice spud beside him and his ice-fishing gear — tip-ups and jig poles, thermos and brandy — spilled from the white…

ilford — I have a daughter and three sons. If there is better duty than being the dad, I have never found it. But on one subject — the nature of sex and its possible outcomes — the counsel I’m required to give my sons, if given to my daughter, sounds unfashionably bombastic, politically suspect…

In 1975, when my father was my age, he had a bronze plate engraved with his name and two dates. ”Edward Lynch,” it read, ”1924-1999.” He put it on a bronze casket in our casket showroom to demonstrate how the up-market units could be customized. It was a sales aid. He was a funeral director.…

When planes fall from the sky, or boats sink in the seas, or trains collide — whenever the worst that can happen happens — everyone in earshot is given pause. And pause we must, over this past week’s sadness with Payne Stewart, the husband, the father and yes, the golfer. And we do. Not because…

The news, lately reported, that the life span of humans might be doubled in the next century is cause for sober and deliberate contemplation. Like so much that is baffling and wondrous, the word comes from a conference in Southern California. Dr. Gregory Stock of the School of Medicine at U.C.L.A., encouraged by experimental successes…

The death notices in The Daily Telegraph make it plain. Most everyone here dies peaceably, in the hospital or after a brief illness. There are, of course, the sad exceptions. One unfortunate local died ”tragically whilst walking in the Dolomites.” One ”went to sleep in her garden.” Another is said to have bravely kept her…

My son and I were moving caskets — an oak with Celtic crosses on the corners, a cherry with a finish like that of our dining-room table, a cardboard box with a reinforced bottom, caskets that could be buried, burned, blown into space or set adrift. (The boomers who are buying funerals now do better…