grief pool

“But there was a comfort in the sadness. It is hard to explain and I don’t know if you feel the same about your mum, but I sometimes indulged my sadness. I headed towards it. Grief felt like the only way to keep close to them. So my mind headed to sad and bittersweet thoughts – even to a walk in the woods with them both thirty-six years ago, pickin

“I missed him so much, but also I felt like I was missing myself too. That’s the thing with grief. The way it kind of sinks you into death as well. I mean, you are still biologically functioning obviously. You are out there breathing and seeing and talking but you aren’t properly alive any more.”

- Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

“I understood her disbelief. People you love deeply become elemental. To hear they won’t be there anymore is like hearing the air or ocean won’t be. It feels like a fatal disruption to the universe.”

- Matt Haig, The Life Impossible

Now, in any case, her life will return, unexplained, to whatever it was before. But no, she thinks, because its shapelessness has been exposed to her now, the old values and meanings floating off unattached, and how can she go about reattaching them? And to what?

….

And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does

Grief is not a defeat or a bad thing. It’s a reaction to one.