DEATH AND GRIEF
Grief, as I understood it—grief and I were acquainted—is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out.
Elizabeth McCracken • The Hero of This Book
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
Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife
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.
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.
Unpeopled Eden
I grieve for many things; the engine of my grief changes, sometimes hourly. I grieve for our increasingly hostile and uninhabitable world, and I grieve for the cruelties that make it so, both structural ones and ones that individuals inflict on one another. But today I am grieving because I struggle to fathom all of the material loss of meaningful ... See more
Hanif Abdurraqib • Lessons for the End of the World
Yet books were finite, podcasts were finite, films had last frames, everything has an end or if not an end then at least—sure, OK, fine—a deadline. Couldn’t we at least find an adequate phrase or image that didn’t feel like a cop-out, a feint, or a compromise? Couldn’t we reach an ending that didn’t lie about the end?
— Catherine Lacey, The Möbius B
... See moreLife has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.
Lori Gottlieb • Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Death is pushed to the margins in modern life. There is much drama about the funeral, but this often remains external and superficial. Our consumerist society has lost the sense of ritual and wisdom necessary to acknowledge this rite of passage. The person who has entered the voyage of death needs more in-depth care.
John O'Donohue • Anam Cara: 25th Anniversary Edition
I do not desire any technology that might bring my late mother back to life, allow me to hear her voice or her laugh again. I believe that what makes the dead worthy of our grieving (by which I mean our memories, our returns, our affections) is that they cannot come back.
Lessons for the End of the World
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