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.

grief, like a welcome rainstorm on parched sand, is not an illness, but a primordial institution of the human soul.

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.

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

The 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