7th Annual O’Donovan Humanities Lecture—Ancient and Modern Grief: Presence and Absence

A pair of scholars, father and daughter, look at grief from two angles. The daughter, a classics scholar, takes up an ancient story of grief and anger from Homer’s Iliad. The father, a priest and theologian in the Episcopal church, ponders the loss of his wife at the end of a struggle with brain disease. Both find tension between absence and presence. Achilles undertakes many futile efforts to “restore” his broken life after he loses Patroklos, and the father finds another Presence precisely in the midst of his loss.