| In this braided essay, I weave together the story of my grandfather's life and experiences as a ball turret gunner in World War II with autobiographical anecdotes about coping with my grandfather's aging and death, as well as research-fueled meditations on small-town murder, gravity, velocity, physics, astrology, bird-watching, and the odd histories of aviation. With personal, scientific, and historical evidence, I fuse the systematic and mathematical notion of flight with the unpredictable and unanswerable problem of death. In doing so, I attempt to solve, or at least investigate, the complex equation for coping with grief.;In Do Not Resuscitate and Other Imperatives, I turn away from watching my grandfather's dying and find solace in science, in mathematics. By examining the habits of dive-bombing mockingbirds, the formula for static thrust, the stars that form Orion, I attempt to uncover a statement about human nature: that the answers we most desperately seek are often the ones that do not exist. |
