DEATH AND GRIEF

The bus makes believe

no one cried into their hands and smeared

that grief onto its walls. The walls

will keep the fingerprints a secret

until the sheen of oils glows by moon.

Rows of ghosts come forth to sing.

I was deep in the kind of heartbreak that I now know is on the required curriculum for that stage of adulthood but that seemed, in the moment, life-ending and completely unique to me.

Yes, a lost house itself is a tragedy, but there is an entire universe in the items inside, an entire universe in the single page of a book that drifts away while you’re running to catch a flight. There is an entire universe in a quote, an entire universe in interpretations of a book that begs for humanity to find a way to survive when our environm... See more

I think in the geography of our lives there are these blank or foggy spaces, little absences left behind from the people that have moved in and out of our lives. I think of parks, and imprints left behind by people in grass; footprints, or the long flat indents left over by bodies when they’re sprawled out on the ground. When a person stands up fro... See more

Grief isn’t productive but it takes a lot of stamina.

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all,” Cormac McCarthy wrote in one of his last novels.

I understand this element of loss, the exercise of cataloguing all that cannot come back, at least not in its original form.

Back home in Chicago, my parents grew old. I didn’t see this happening and neither did they. They were busy birdwatching, attending new plays, trying new restaurants. Our relationship had mellowed and warmed with time. But then my father, my sweet, strong, and only father—he began to die, and then he died. Words that still don’t sound true five yea... See more