The word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that

We’d probably pay more attention if no one died all year, and then on December 31 the entire population of Chicago suddenly dropped dead. Or Houston. Or Las Vegas and Detroit put together. Instead, unless a celebrity or public figure dies, we tend to overlook the necro demographic as they slip away into history.