Moving On

I was saddened to read of the death last Friday of Wall Street Journal writer Jeff Zazlow, after a collision with a truck on a snowy road in northern Michigan.  His Moving On column had been a source of comfort to me when my brother passed away in 2002.

Zazlow had a way of writing about love, loss and transition that was uniquely empathetic but never sentimental.  He's perhaps best known for his column about the late Carnegie Mellon engineering professor Randy Pausch, which led to the book The Last Lecture.

The column I remember most was one he wrote about dreams about the dead and how their visits, real or not, help survivors cope and come to terms with loss.

An excerpt:

"Every night, millions of people are visited by deceased loved ones. In dreams, the living and the dead embrace, converse and reach understandings. What are we to make of these encounters? Are they merely emotional responses to dreamers' grief? Or, as research suggests, are there patterns to these dreams that could explain the inexplicable?"