Sublime

‘Motherhood is an obliteration of the self,’

Today, most of us lack the direct experience of being witness to a meaningful and family-centered dying process. We have outsourced the washing, dressing, and burial of the body of our beloved. Furthermore, just as grief is too often viewed as an illness to overcome, death, too, is seen as something to “fight.”

Of course families have fallen apart in every generation. But even a few decades ago children from broken homes had communities, they had neighbourhoods. Now our families fall apart and there is nothing, nobody, to catch us. We live far from extended family. We are more estranged than ever. And I can’t get across how little familiarity Gen Z has

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK,

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try. ‘Imagine,’ I said, back then, to some friends, in an earnest attempt to explain, ‘imagine