DEATH AND GRIEF

Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, “Love was here.” In the finer print, quietly, “Love still is.”

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... See more

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.

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

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.

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... See more

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... See more

People always say you just get over it on a random Tuesday. I didn’t believe that was true until it happened to me. When a wound is fresh, it’s so difficult to envision a future where this person doesn’t matter so much to you anymore. But over time, as the months accumulate and as you go about your routines, you start to realize that you’ve... See more

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.