grief and remembering

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

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And I don’t think this situation resolves itself as you grow older. In fact, more people just die. Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.

The trick is to metabolize pain as energy. Learn, when hit by loss, to ask the right question: "What next?" instead of "Why me?

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 tha

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When you look back at the most fruitful moments of your life years from now, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them unfolded amid a big loss or a crisis or in the face of a giant unknown.

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.

So we stumbled through our loving, difficult readings and tiny speeches; then the button was pushed, and as the coffin advanced solemnly into the furnace, dysfunctional squawks came like a shower of arrows out of the sound system. The tape kept trying to play and its clicks and grindings were amplified very efficiently into the overhead speakers. T

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But if we are lucky enough, if we are are stubborn enough, we love and we lose and then the loss opens us up to more love — different love, because each love is unrepeatable and irreplaceable — on the other side of grief; love unimaginable from the barren landmass of loss, love without which, once found, the world comes to feel unimaginable.