Jenny Oliver
@joliver
Jenny Oliver
Grief, as I understood it—grief and I were acquainted—is the kind of loss that sets you on fire as you struggle to put it out.
Elizabeth McCracken • The Hero of This Book
grief is not a problem to be solved or a malady to be cured. It’s a sacred reality to be entered.
Mirabai Starr • Grieving Together
Grief is not just an emotion—it’s an unraveling, a space where something once lived but is now gone. It carves through you, leaving a hollow ache where love once resided. In the beginning, it feels unbearable, like a wound that will never close. But over time, the raw edges begin to mend. The pain softens, but the imprint remains—a quiet reminder
... See moreThe word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that
... See moreJoanne Cacciatore • Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief
Lament tells the truth about what is. It refuses to ignore pain and injustice. It won’t turn its face away from the realities of losing something or someone precious. It is an expression of love. Lament allows sorrow to be expressed, both to honor beloveds we’ve lost and to honor the gap left in our communities and our souls by their absence.
Terra McDaniel • Hopeful Lament
no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.
Haruki Murakami • Norwegian Wood
The point of these and other traditions is that death becomes something communal and therefore familiar. Today, the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico still serve the same purpose: there is little room for fear when death is so beautiful and colourful. These traditions, so different from ours, call the oddities of our own into question. ‘Why do
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