grief and remembering
by Rob Tourtelot · updated 3h ago
grief and remembering
- You’re right that profound grief quickly pushes you away from both certitude and indifference, which are unproductive feelings—
That’s right. Certitude and indifference. They’re the problems with this world.from Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life by Amanda Petrusich
Rob Tourtelot added 3h ago
- Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.
from Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life by Amanda Petrusich
Rob Tourtelot added 3h ago
- Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too.
from Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All by Maria Popova
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago
- On the other hand, no person we have loved is ever fully gone. When they die or vanish, they are physically no longer present, but their personhood permeates our synapses with memories and habits of mind, saturates an all-pervading atmosphere of feeling we don’t just carry with us all the time but live and breathe inside. Or the opposite happens, w... See more
from Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing by Maria Popova
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago
- What can we do when we are forced to face death? Do we continue ignoring it or do we weave it into our understanding, possibly creating a more nuanced appreciation for both the fleetingness of life and its interconnected nature? I find that it is this very activity that can arm us with the tools needed to continue living in a world that no longer p... See more
from After mom died, I found great comfort in a medieval Andalusian tale | Psyche Ideas by Veronica Menaldi
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago
- I call these experiences our dark teachers. The lessons that hurt, scare, scar, wound, and almost destroy us are very often the things that make us who we are because they require us to muster what we thought we could not muster—courage, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love, resilience, strength, generosity of spirit, ferocity of heart. The time... See more
from Happy Anniversary to This
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago
We’re all hurtling through our lives and the planet is hurtling through space without a seat belt. We have to discover successively more freedom inside the terrible things that have happened and terrible things that certainly will happen, and the whole of it is also a mysterious splendor, full of kindness, welcome and cups of tea.
from John Tarrant : Articles by John Tarrant
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago
But getting older is hard. It is a gift, yes, but it is also heavy. Just as the doors of possibility become fewer and farther between, the burden of grief gets bigger. As the years pass, our losses in life accumulate, threatening to weigh us down. It takes active effort—breaths, walks, conversations with friends, rest—to slow down and remember tha
... See morefrom Is This It? This is It. by Katie Hawkins Gaar
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago
What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple "I'm sorry," because in its banality it presumes nothing. Ndo, in Igbo, comforts more, a word that is "sorry" with a metaphysical heft, a word with borders wider than mere "sorry." Concrete and sincere memories from those who knew him comfort the mos
... See morefrom Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Rob Tourtelot added 1mo ago