Grief Is for People

The anxiety may have been a blanket but the sadness was a knife.

“I’d rather cry in the back of a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle,”

have read the grief literature and the grief philosophy and, God help me, listened to the grief podcasts, and the most practical thing I have learned is the power of the present tense. The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float. Nothing is missing, nothing is hypothetical.

The base read: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it sure helps!” The miracle of life is not that we have it, it’s that most of us wake up every day and agree to fight for it, to hold it in our arms even when it squirms to get away. It’s a miracle, a genuine miracle, that the reverse doesn’t happen more often. Or, to quote Russell’s favor

used to tease Russell about anthropomorphizing clocks and lamps, for treating the flea market like his personal orphanage. He believed in the souls of objects. It’s where so much of his emotion lived, in these annexes of textiles and glassware, the miscellany of other people’s lives. Items without a home made him restless. It was not enough for you

Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse—delicate things made out of solid materials. And

as the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg wrote, “You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation.”

It’s author,