One Wedding and Two Funerals

The summer is winding down. And a dramatic one it has been on the personal front: one wedding and two funerals.

My mother-in-law, Frances (Tiny) Gruson died yesterday. The funeral is on Sunday. She lived a long life, ninety-six years. She was in slow decline for the last ten, rapid decline in recent months. She experienced the gift of the full cycle of life.

Casey Young, my niece’s daughter, Tiny’s great granddaughter, was not so fortunate. Hers was a life that was meant to be, but wasn’t. She died in June, mysteriously during her afternoon nap, at twenty-one months. A century ago, what Casey’s mother and father are going through was a most difficult part of the human condition. Now, thanks to advances in modern medicine and health care, it feels like a moral outrage, a direct assault on meaning, unbearable for those who were the closest to Casey, extremely painful for the rest of us. We don’t know what to do, as we muddle through. We are overwhelmed with grief, trying to find a way to continue.

In the meanwhile, I put a book to sleep. I had to proofread the galleys of Reinventing Political Culture, which will be published at the end of September. I was involved in a minor controversy at The New School, taught my class in Wroclaw, and as the readers of Deliberately Considered know, I have been working constantly to keep this experiment in deliberate public reflection and discussion alive, trying to turn it from the more personal blog that it was to a more cooperative online magazine, as was my plan from the beginning.

And then, in the middle of the personal chaos and the professional ebbs and flows, my son Sam and Lili Lu were married. Now they are in the northern paradise of the Fjords of Norway. Their happiness, along with the great joy of being together with our family to celebrate, lifts our spirits. But it does not balance out. And I realize as a man of many words that I have little to say, other than to report the facts.