grief and remembering

We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, how joyful the world can suddenly be. Human beings... See more

Indeed, when Kant's friend Funk died, he found himself forced to confront what is in some ways the ultimate example of the instant of change: the fact that all that we love will pass, including life itself. Even more poignantly, the very ineradicable nature of that constant, irresistible erosion of the present is what endows our life and the

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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.

There’s a layered quality to suffering and intense emotion. As you become interested, a tiny, elf light appears in the darkest dungeon. That’s the gate of emptiness. As you become more interested, you walk deeper into the forest and everything looks different. Sometimes it becomes joyful right away but it doesn’t need to. It’s become a path and

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After the death of my mother I noticed that I didn’t have a repertoire of off-the-shelf feelings. Sometimes I was sad, but mostly I was happy in a way unconnected to her going. Sometimes I was forgetful. When I poured her ashes off an old cast-iron bridge into the river she had lived on all her life, it seemed an intimate and friendly act, and I

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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... See more

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... See more

Relationships are mapped through the brain and body using three dimensions:

1. space


2. time


3. closeness (emotional)

Grief is a process of distancing and reordering our relationship from space, time, and closeness (for example, not expecting to see them at a certain time or place, etc.) in order to cope with loss.

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

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