A Reflection on Depression & a Friend Passing

If you have invited such a person or group to move consciously through conflict, and they’ve refused you, first you must give yourself wholeheartedly to grief. In French, instead of “I miss you,” we say, “Tu me manques” which means “you are missing from me.” In your grief, you are valuing the impact of your separation, the missing they’ve left behi

Losing someone to a mental illness evokes profound grief—akin to the losses felt through divorce. Individuals struggling with mental illness walk amongst us, their presence an absence—a haunting of what might have been.

Over the next months, severe depression was revealed to me as an unimagined abyss. I learned that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced serious depression cannot understand what it is like just by extrapolating from our own periods of sadness. As the philosophers Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch have written, it is not just sorrow, i

One dies, and only intimate friends mourn—and how few they are.”