Life & Faith

A songwriter and a philosopher contemplate death, loss and what it means to grieve well. --- Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes. But if death is something we all face at some point, and grief is part of the human experience, we talk about them surprisingly little. In fact, it’s something we don’t necessarily do all that well as a culture. "The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips," wrote the poet Octavio Paz in 1961. His words still ring true today. Some of us, like musician Phil Davidson, eventually find a way to deal with sorrow after the loss of a loved one. "I could hear the foghorns of the ships that were leaving Belfast harbour and going out to sea," Phil says about that night after he last saw Agnes, his grandmother, alive. "I was lying there just thinking about my grandmother, I could hear these foghorns, and I’m thinking these ships are kind of all lost at sea. I thought that’s a great kind of analogy of how I was feeling." So he got up