Rob Tourtelot
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 fe
... See morefrom Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life by John Tarrant
We’re all hurtling through our lives and the planet is hurtling through space without a seat belt. We have to discover successively more freedom inside the terrible things that have happened and terrible things that certainly will happen, and the whole of it is also a mysterious splendor, full of kindness, welcome and cups of tea.
from John Tarrant : Articles by John Tarrant
- After the death of a loved one, the incoming messages seem scrambled for a while. At times, closeness with our deceased loved one feels incredibly visceral, as though they are present in the room, here and now. At other times, the string seems to have fallen off the board — not shorter or longer than it was before, but simply stolen from us entirel... See more
from Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing by Maria Popova
- 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.
from Tolerating Unknowns Will Make You Stronger by Heather Havrilesky
Grief, when it comes is nothing like we expect it to be. Joan Didion
- Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.
from Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life by Amanda Petrusich
- 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.from Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life by Amanda Petrusich
- On the other hand, no person we have loved is ever fully gone. When they die or vanish, they are physically no longer present, but their personhood permeates our synapses with memories and habits of mind, saturates an all-pervading atmosphere of feeling we don’t just carry with us all the time but live and breathe inside. Or the opposite happens, w... See more
from Your Brain on Grief, Your Heart on Healing by Maria Popova
- Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too.
from Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All by Maria Popova