Rainey Blogs on Some Days

Recently I picked a little French restaurant in the NoHo section of New York City for us to go to on my birthday called Le Philosophe . It turned out to be quite an ironic choice, albeit an accidental one. Earlier in the same week, I had attended my daughter's middle school soccer game in Haledon, New Jersey. I arrived in the second half to find our team well ahead and to find the other team with two players on the other wearing Islamic headscarves, including the goalkeeper. (I am uncertain if there is any connection to the headscarves and our soccer victory.) I do not recall thinking to myself, "Well, if we were in France, I don't think they would be doing that!" although earlier in the year I had read the first chapter of a book called Why the French Don't Like Headscarves , which is about the ban on Islamic women from wearing the hijab , or headscarves, in France. I guess it turns out that having a secular society doesn't necessarily correspond to havin...

When a person’s last living parent dies, there is not only a profound sense of loss and finality, but also another aspect of the grief that may not be so readily apparent: the end of being someone’s child. After waiting in the family line for a lifetime, the grieving son or daughter now moves to the front of the line. And it is as this point that he or she realizes that the next train into the station will be coming for them. I think the grief of losing a parent is not just the pain of losing a mother or father, but it is also grief at the loss of one’s own youth to the throes of advancing age. The mist of our lives is evaporating, and nothing like the loss of a parent can make it any more apparent. Mortality is on full display when our last living parent departs because each of us knows our own death must also be lurking out there in the murky waters somewhere. I am not yet fifty, yet I have been standing at the head of my family line now for several years. It is a burden that has...