Grief New Year Quotes

You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they’re inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.

Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they’re inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.

They made a major mistake," he blurted out, "the dumb bastards, when they didn't start by killing you first." "Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone's ever given me." I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth. "You know," I whispered, "a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that." He shook his head. "Not worth it." And, for one-ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn't before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past: For everything under the sun there is a time. This is the season of your awkward harvesting, When the pain takes you where you would rather not go, Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place You had forgotten you knew from the inside out; And a time when that bitter tree was planted That has grown always invisibly beside you And whose branches your awakened hands Now long to disentangle from your heart. You are coming to see how your looking often darkened When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love, How deep down your eyes were always owned by something That faced them through a dark fester of thorns Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong; You could only see what touched you as already torn. Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning. And your memory is ready to show you everything, Having waited all these years for you to return and know. Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering And according to your readiness, everything will open. May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide Who can accompany you through the fear and grief Until your heart has wept its way to your true self. As your tears fall over that wounded place, May they wash away your hurt and free your heart. May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound So that for the first time you can walk away from that place, Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed, And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.

It's all rehearsed, in a weird way. People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way. The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little of us left to care.

My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power of the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.

So that's it. That's the big secret. I tried to kill myself on New Year's eve. Just like Sadie did last night. Only she really did it. I don't know all the detatils, just the basics. She took a bunch of pills. I don't know what they were or where she got them. I'd like to think they were Wonder Drug. Then at least she could have gone thinking she was flying.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.

For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning--clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, she thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear.

I circled the site before I came in. If there's anyone within five kilometers, I'll eat my quiver." Halt regarded him, eyebrow arched once more. "Anyone?" "Anyone other than Crowley," Will amended, making a dismissive gesture. "I saw him watching me from that hide he always uses about two kilometers out. I assumed he'd be back in here by now." Halt cleared his throat loudly. "Oh, you saw him, did you?" he said. "I imagine he'll be overjoyed to hear that." Secretly, he was pleased with his former pupil. In spite of his curiosity and obvious excitement, he hadn't forgotten to take the precautions that had been drilled into him. THat augured well for what lay ahead, Halt thought, a sudden grimness settling onto his manner. Will didn't notice the momentary change of mood. He was loosening Tug saddle girth. As he spoke, his voice was muffled against the horses's flank. "he's becoming too much a creature of habit," he said. "he's used that hide for the last three Gatherings. It's time he tried something new. Everyone must be onto it by now." Rangers constantly competed with each other to see before being seen and each year's Gathering was a time of heightened competition. Halt nodded thoughtfully. Crowley had constructed teh virtually invisible observation post some four years previously. Alone among the younger Rangers, Will had tumbled to it after one year. Halt had never mentioned to him that he was the only one who knew of Crowley's hide. The concealed post was the Ranger Commandant's pride and joy. "Well, perhaps not everyone," he said. Will emerged from behind his horse, grinning at the thought of the head of the Ranger Corps thinking he had remained hidden from sight as he watched Will's approach. "All the same, perhaps he's getting a bit long in the tooth to be skulking around hiding in the bushes, don't you think?" he said cheerfully. Halt considered the question for a moment. "Long in the tooth? Well, that's one opinion. Mind you, his silent movement skills are still as good as ever," he said meaningfully. The grin on Will's face slowly faded. He resisted the temptation to look over his shoulder. "He's standing behind me, isn't he?" he asked Halt. THe older Ranger nodded. "He's standing behind me, isn't he?" Will continued and Halt nodded once more. "Is he...close enough to have heard what I said?" Will finally managed to ask, fearin teh worst. This time, Halt didn't have to answer. "Oh, good grief no," came a familiar voice from behind him. "he's so old and decrepit these days he's as deaf as a post." Will's shoulders sagged and he turned to see the sandy-haired Commandant standing a few meters away. The younger man's eyes dropped. "Hullo, Crowley," he said, then mumbled, "Ahhh...I'm sorry about that." Crowley glared at teh young Ranger for a few more seconds, then he couldn't help teh grin breaking out on his face. "No harm done," he said, adding with a small note of triumph, "It's not often these days I amange to get the better of one of you young ones." Secretly, he was impressed at teh news that Will had spotted his hiding place. Only the sarpest eyes could have picked it. Crowley had been in the business of seeing without being seen for thirty years or more, and despite what Will believed, he was still an absolute master of camouflage and unseen movement.

MOTHER – By Ted Kooser Mid April already, and the wild plums bloom at the roadside, a lacy white against the exuberant, jubilant green of new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet, only the delicate, star-petaled blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume. You have been gone a month today and have missed three rains and one nightlong watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar from six to eight while fat spring clouds went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured, a storm that walked on legs of lightning, dragging its shaggy belly over the fields. The meadowlarks are back, and the finches are turning from green to gold. Those same two geese have come to the pond again this year, honking in over the trees and splashing down. They never nest, but stay a week or two then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts, burning in circles like birthday candles, for this is the month of my birth, as you know, the best month to be born in, thanks to you, everything ready to burst with living. There will be no more new flannel nightshirts sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand. You asked me if I would be sad when it happened and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner, as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that. Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself,” a novel “imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.

Underneath my grief that day a resolution was hardening into cement: I would never, ever again create something thinking that I would be able to preserve it.

Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time.

One thing I have learned during these past few terrible years is that our grief and sorrow should be shared, not carried alone.

However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.

Over the years I have learned that grief is contagious. You can catch it if you get too close.

It was a grief about which you could not, must not, dare not speak.

Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.

A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.

What grief is not taken away by time? What passion will survive an unequal battle with it? I knew a man in the bloom of his still youthful powers, filled with true nobility and virtue, I knew him when he was in love, tenderly, passionately, furiously, boldly, modestly, and before me, almost before my eyes, the object of his passion - tender, beautiful as an angel - was struck down by insatiable death. I never saw such terrible fits of inner suffering, such furious scorching anguish, such devouring despair as shook the unfortunate lover. I never thought a man could create such a hell for himself, in which there would be no shadow, no image, nothing in the least resembling hope... They tried to keep an eye on him; they hid all instruments he might have used to take his own life. Two weeks later he suddenly mastered himself: he began to laugh, to joke; freedom was granted him, and the first thing he did was buy a pistol. One day his family was terribly frightened by the sudden sound of a shot. They ran into the room and saw him lying with his brains blown out. A doctor who happened to be there, whose skill was on everyone's lips, saw signs of life in him, found that the wound was not quite mortal, and the man, to everyone's amazement, was healed. The watch on him was increased still more. Even at the table they did not give him a knife to and tried to take away from him anything that he might strike himself with; but a short while later he found a new occasion and threw himself under the wheels of a passing carriage. His arms and legs were crushed; but again they saved him. A year later I saw him in a crowded room; he sat at the card table gaily saying 'Petite ouverte,' keeping one card turned down, and behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, stood his young wife, who was sorting through his chips.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck's soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer. For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. “Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be

Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dream of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend. But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years, past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit - an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility - the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one’s soul with all of this - the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fishermen is still rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called - humaneness.

When you look at the world as it is, how can you not be racked with grief? But when you look closer, how can you not be overwhelmed with awe?

Grief takes about a year,” Mrs. Kelly once told a young mother who had lost her son. “You have to get through each holiday, each new season. You will cry at Christmas and New Year’s and Mother’s Day and Thanksgiving. You will suffer with the first daffodil, the first falling red leaves, the first snow . . . Each occasion, each new season will rip your heart out; then, when there’s nothing left, you’ll get better.” She was right, and she knew from experience.

Every day there are people who feel as if life itself has left them on a doorstep or thrown them away. Abandonment is about loss of love itself, that crucial loss of connectedness. It often involves breakup, betrayal, aloneness—something people can experience all at once, or one after another over a period of months, or even years later as an aftershock. Abandonment means different things to different people. It is an extremely personal and individual experience. Sometimes it is lingering grief caused by old losses. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it can be an invisible barrier holding us back from forming relationships, from reaching our true potential. It can take the form of self-sabotage. We get caught up in patterns of abandonment.

Carrie knew, that in a few years, the memories would begin to fade. She might forget whether her father had spilled mustard or ketchup. She might lose the ability to recall the exact smell of Wind Song. She might even forget about the reading glasses altogether after a while, as much as it pained her to admit it. She knew that she could not sustain her life fuelled only by the memories of those she once loved. Loss would not propel her forward. She had to go out and live. She had to find new people.

There is a period of one to two earth years that humans are to refrain from making big decisions. It’s because you don’t always make the best decisions when you are grieving. Those who make decisions in haste often live to regret them. You must move through the time of suffering, strengthening your faith and being willing to grow through the grief in order to be able to see things differently. As you grow, your blind faith will continue to open your eyes. You will see everything in a whole new light when you come out the other side of grief. Then you will be able to make very good decisions for yourself, better than ever, because of what you learned.

So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America—a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years—from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.

And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistakes; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.

Long Distance II Though my mother was already two years dead Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas, put hot water bottles her side of the bed and still went to renew her transport pass. You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone. He’d put you off an hour to give him time to clear away her things and look alone as though his still raw love were such a crime. He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief though sure that very soon he’d hear her key scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief. He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea. I believe life ends with death, and that is all. You haven’t both gone shopping; just the same, in my new black leather phone book there’s your name and the disconnected number I still call.

You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they’re inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.

Death is an ending, but it is not the end. The day your loved one died marks the beginning of a new life for you, a life where your loved one is no longer present in the physical world. It’s a horrendously painful ending, and simultaneously, it marks a new beginning for you. Their death is not the end of your story as a whole, but the end of a very beautiful and important chapter in your life. Your task in this new beginning is to grieve the painful ending— and to learn how to navigate life in the aftermath of loss.

How are you? I'm shattered, thanks, how are you? I walk aimlessly through the rooms of my house, what have you been up to? I have woken up in the middle of the last 240 nights in a heart-pounding sweat, what's new with you? I sometimes wish I would never wake up, have you been on vacation this year? I ache for the arms of my sweetheart to hold me tight, how's your family? I feel barren and useless and creepy and mundane, seen any good movies lately? I'm terrified that I'll feel this way forever, I like that sweater you're wearing. I keep seeing his body on the hospital gurney, don't you love this weather. My broken heart is in my throat, let's do lunch. I'm so completely and utterly tired of being sad, thanks, how are you?

I suppose, he was thinking, that we heard this tale of the Herzogs ten times a year. Sometimes Mama told it, sometimes he. So we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities -- yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience and destiny. What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering. We are on a more brutal standard now, a new terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the program of human destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even with joy. These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember. I must. But who else -- to whom can this matter? So many millions -- multitudes -- go down in terrible pain. And, at that, moral suffering is denied, these days. Personalities are good only for comic relief. But I am still a slave to Papa's pain. The way Father Herzog spoke of himself! That could make one laugh. His I had such dignity.

As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As

And so the explanation for why Agatha Christie is the most popular author in the history of the world. Her appeal is as wide and her dissemination as great as the Bible's, because she is a modern apostle, a female one--about time, after two thousand years of men blathering on. And this new apostle answers the same questions Jesus answered: What are we to do with death? Because murder mysteries are always resolved in the end, the mystery neatly dispelled. We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context however hard that might be.

He paused a moment, gazing in awe at the huge mass of buildings composing the castle. It stood close to the river, on either side and to the rear stretched the extensive park and gardens, filled with splendid trees, fountains and beds of brilliant flowers in shades of pink, crimson, and scarlet. The castle itself was built of pink granite, and enclosed completely a smaller, older building which the present Duke's father had considered too insignificant for his town residence. The new castle had taken forty years to build; three architects and hundreds of men had worked day and night, and the old Duke had personally selected every block of sunset-colored stone that went to its construction. 'I want it to look like a great half-open rose,' he declared to the architects, who were fired with enthusiasm by this romantic fancy. It was begun as a wedding present to the Duke's wife, whose name was Rosamond, but unfortunately she died some nine years before it was completed. 'never mind, it will do for her memorial instead,' said the grief-stricken but practical widower. The work went on. At last the final block was laid in place. The Duke, by now very old, went out in his barouche and drove slowly along the opposite riverbank to consider the effect. He paused midway for a long time, then gave his opinion. 'It looks like a cod cutlet covered in shrimp sauce,' he said, drove home, took to his bed, and died.

We tell the story of our grief for two reasons: first, to solidify in our brains and hearts that life without our loved one is our new reality; and second, to realize that we are not alone. Just as grief is not a one-time event, telling the story of our loss is not a one-time event, either. We must share the story of what happened, to make sense of it for ourselves and to connect with others who are experiencing similar pain.

In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that the parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.

Crying. Expelling grief from the body in the form of salt water. What's its purpose? How did it evolve, and why are humans the only creatures on Earth that do it? Nora wonders how many years it takes to dry up that messy urge.

TWENTY SMALL GRAVES There was a woman who bore a child almost every year, but the children never lived longer than six months. Usually after three or four months they would die. She grieved long and publicly. "I take on the work of pregnancy for nine months, but the joy vanishes quicker than a rainbow." Twenty children went like that, in fevers to their small graves. One night she had a revelation. She saw the place of unconditional love, call it the garden or source of gardens. The physical eye cannot see its unseeable light. Lamp, green flower, these are just comparisons, so that some of the love-bewildered may catch a fragrance. The woman saw pure grace and, drunk with the seeing, fell to the ground. Those who have the vision said then, "This morning meal is for those who rise with sincere devotion. The tragedies you've had came from other times when you did not take refuge." "Lord, give me more grief. Tear me to pieces, if it leads here." She said this and walked into the presence she had seen. Her children were all there, "Lost to me," she cried, "but not to you." Without this great grieving no one can enter the spirit.

The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves. She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away. 'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'... 'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them. 'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.' ...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her. He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her. 'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.' In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

In earlier times, decades, centuries, even when we drove ourselves mad, even when we lost days or years to drinking, drugging, pain, grief-- the years have always maintained their seasons: trees shedding their leaves for new buds; birds and insects flying away in formation and then returning; the luminous moon waxing and waning; the ocean tides flowing and ebbing; new growth, babies aborning, as certain as trauma, as certain as death. All things went on no matter the chaos inside us. There was a childish anger that everything just carried on, ignored our turmoil-- our grief-- but there was also a deep and profound comfort. We ourselves may be lost but the road continued ever winding... Have we disrupted that continuum? Can we no longer count on that continuity? Is that why our children are so afraid but also so unwilling to swallow systemic lies and deeply imbedded fallacies we allowed ourselves to live by? Because the future-- a future-- any future-- is no longer sure?

In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria's dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria's face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river, Up a lazy river where the robin's song wakes a brand-new morning as we roll along. It was a celebration, that day. They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren't prepared to let go. They threw sticks into an eddy and watched them circle. Put a blanket down, ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. Later in the afternoon, her sister began crying, like a change in the weather, for no reason except the popping of a wine cork. Jaslyn handed her a wadded tissue. Gloria laughed at them and said that she'd overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

It is when an end descends that we either find immense joy in its departure, or we are weighed heavy with grief over the passing of it. But the unrelenting beauty of life is that every new beginning is ingeniously crafted to meet us in either place and flawlessly move us forward from both.

In the Old Testament, a person in grief tore his robe and didn’t run out to Kohl’s to get a new one to go to church. Women cut their hair. Men shaved their beards. There was weeping and wailing. For a whole year, nobody expected you to look or be the way you were. How wonderful! But in our nutty society, the person who “keeps it together,” who’s “so brave,” and who “looks so great — you’d never know,” that’s who is applauded. Grief is not the opposite of faith. Mourning is not the opposite of hope. I believe that well-meaning Christians can try to hurry us out of our mourning because we make them uncomfortable. The Bible does not say to cheer up the bereaved, but rather to “mourn with those who mourn.” Christ does not say we grieve because we are deficient in faith, but rather, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted [not rushed]” (Matthew 5:4).

It is this totality that leaves me frantic with grief. For years I’ve labored to build myself a new life, something very different from how I was raised. But now, all of a sudden, every conflict I’ve encountered, every loss, every failure and foible in my life, can be traced back to its root: me.

The creek was hers now and yet she felt nothing. It had been the longest walk of her life for no one was at the end waiting for her. She slept through winter. Missed Christmas and awoke to a New Year. She felt so lost. Until the first bluebells and ramsons colored the green-brown floor of her world.

Glistening liquid pooled in two spots. Matthew was trying to clean it up, but his hands were shaking, his jaw working. I grabbed some towels from the linen closet and knelt beside him. “I have this,” I whispered. Matthew sat back, lifting his head and closing his eyes. He let out a staggered breath. “This should’ve never happened.” Tear built in my eyes as I sopped up what was left of Adam. “I know.” They are all like my children. Now I’ve lost another, and for what? It doesn’t make sense.” His shoulders shook. “It never makes sense.” “I’m sorry.” Wetness gathered on my cheeks, and I wiped at my face with my shoulder. “His is my fault. He was trying to protect me.” …. “It’s not just your fault Katy. This was a world you stumbled into, one filled with treachery and greed. You weren’t prepared for it. Neither are any of them.” I lifted my head, blinking back tears. “I trusted Blake when I should’ve trusted Daemon. I let this happen.” Matthew twisted toward me, grasping my cheeks. “You cannot take on the full responsibility for this. You didn’t make the choices Blake did. You didn’t force his hand.” I choked on a broken sob as grief tore through me. His words didn’t ease the guilt, and he knew it. Then the strangest thing happened. He pulled me into his arms, and I broke. Sobs raked my entire body. I pressed my head against his shoulder, my body shaking his, or maybe he was crying for his loss, too. Time passed, and it became New Year. I welcomed it with tears streaming down my face and a heart ripped apart. When my tear dried, my eyes nearly swollen shut. He pulled back, pushing my hair aside. “This isn’t the end of anything for you … for Daemon. This is just the beginning, and now you know what you’re truly up against. Don’t end up like Dawson and Bethany. Both of you are stronger than that.

You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.

The Biden's have another belief as well:" If you have to ask, it's too late." When someone is in need, when they're hurting, when they're overwhelmed, you don't wait until they tell you they need your help. You give it before they have to ask. So when Neilia died and Joe was left with two young boys, trying to father them and get through his own grief, all while juggling the new hectic life of a senator, Val didn't ask if there was something she could do. She moved in. And for three years, through her own career ambitions, through her courtship and eventual marriage to her husband, Jack, she lived with Joe and the boys and made sure they had the love and support they needed to keep going.

People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way. The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there’s little of us left to care.

That’s when Kat realized that “I had let go of my pain, my story of loss, my victimhood, the grief and fear and sense of failure and shame and guilt from so much abandonment. I had to say good-bye to all the negative emotions that I had embodied over the years. Because when I let go, I was greeted by a new, deeper layer of wholeness, a sense of inner freedom.

When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all. Afterward comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological-- vertigo in a shelving canyon -- but it's not like that; it's just misery as regular as a job. What do we doctors say? I'm deeply sorry, Mrs Blank; there will of course be a period of mourning but rest assured you will come out of it; two of these each evening, I would suggest; perhaps a new interst, Mrs Blank; can maintenance, formation dancing?; don't worry, six months will see you back on the roundabout; come and see me again any time; oh nurse, when she calls, just give her this repeat will you, no I don't need to see her, well it's not her that's dead is it, look on the bright side. What did she say her name was? And then it happens to you. There's no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time.... you should eat stuffed sow's heart. I might yet have to fall back on this remedy. I've tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that's all it's ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn't; often, it doesn't even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands. Other people think you want to talk. 'Do you want to talk about Ellen?' they ask, hinting that they won't be embarrassed if you break down. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don't; it makes little difference. The word aren't the right ones; or rather, the right words don't exist. 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people's griefs. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. There is a limited choice of prayers on offer: gabble the syllables. And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But your don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

The conduct of a new sedoretu is to some extent, and wisely, prescribed by custom and sanctioned by religion. The first night after the ceremony of marriage belongs to the Morning and Evening couples; the second night to the Day and Night couples. Thereafter the four spouses may join as and when they please, but always and only by invitation given and accepted, and the arrangements are to be known to all four. Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

And suddenly it seemed utterly right to me that resistance had been his wish, his intention. It made a kind of emotional sense that caused me to feel, instantly, how little sense my earlier more or less unframed assumptions had made. Of course! I thought. And with that thought it was as though my father stepped forward to meet me as he had been in 1940: twenty-five years old, newly married, teaching literature and history and religion as his first real job, as an assistant professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. That stage of his life – and he in it – had always been indistinct to me, as the lives of parents before their children exist always are to those children; but now, holding this letter in my hands, I remembered anew and vividly the numerous photographs in our family albums of him then – a slender young man, intense-looking and handsome, with a shock of dark hair swept back from his high forehead. A radical young man, it would seem. More radical in many ways than my own son was now. A young man, ready, perhaps even eager to embrace the fate his powerful beliefs were calling him to. Sitting there, I felt a rush of love and pity for him in his youth, in his passionate convictions – really, the same feelings I often had for my son when he argued his heartfelt positions. Abruptly, they seemed alike to me and equally dear: my father, my son. I felt as though my father had been waiting for this moment to be born to me as the young man he’d been, so touchingly willing to bear witness to his conscience; and the surprise of this new sense of him, this birth, was a gift to me, a sudden balm in those days of my most intense grief.

That wondrous instant of our meeting — my mind’s eye sees you standing there, a vision transient and fleeting, true beauty’s spirit, pure and rare. In toils of hopeless grief confounded, amid life’s noise and stress it seems for long that tender voice resounded and those sweet features came in dreams. Years passed; the storms that life engenders dispersed my former hopes of grace and I forgot those accents tender, the heavenly beauty of your face. And in my dark incarceration my days passed like the clouds above, bereft alike of inspiration, of tears, of life itself, of love. My soul awoke to new existence, again you stood before me there, a vision lasting but an instant, true beauty’s spirit, pure and rare. My heart relives the old sensation and once more steal down from above, God’s benediction, inspiration, and tears, and life itself and love.

rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself,” a novel “imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.” In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.

Walking alone in the dark early the next morning, New Year's Day, the coming year stretched out like a bleak and endless highway, leading nowhere.... Having held on for months, thinking that that if only we can get through to the new year, now I felt plunged into black ice, in danger of drowning.... Suddenly I understood our friends' concern. Could this be what precedes some kind of breakdown--a sudden shift to feel oblivion as temptation, even as seduction?

Let the sky celebrate! Let it pour some rain to wash away the past years' grief. Let the fireworks speak announcing a New Year to break, displaying seasons of different flavours. Oh New Year, can you restore our hopes and spill our fears? I wonder.. What will you bring? Happiness, confusion, or sadness? Let the other years witness.. your joy, your pity, your cruelty, and your niceness. So New Year, I have too many hopes in you. My wishes are infinite, what are you going to do? Don't disappoint me, I suppose you already know. The hope fountain knows no chains, Don't tell me it's all in vain.. Tell me how I can refrain myself from dreaming in my dale. If only there was a chance or even an opportunity in disguise, I wouldn't cease proving and proving my worth all the time, I would use my ship to sail, And you will witness my success.. This is what I promise, And here comes the test.. Let me declare it in that feast.. So New Year, I have too many hopes in you..

Looking at them now as folks chased in and out, getting ready, it was hard for Cora to image a time when the fourteen cabins hadn't been there. For all the wear, the complaints from deep in the wood at every step, the cabins had the always-quality of the hills to the west, of the creek that bisected the property. The cabins radiated permanence and in turn summed timeless feelings in those who lived and died in them: envy and spite. If they'd left more space between the old cabins and the new cabins it would have spared a lot of grief over the years.

lure of reinvention. Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us. I have aged in the months since my husband’s death and my diagnosis. My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often—in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. At least that I will be forgiven. I know better, though, don’t I? *   *   * My house, named The Peaks by the lumber baron who built it more than a hundred years ago, is for sale, and I am preparing to move because my son thinks I should. He is trying to take care of

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.’ ‘I don’t know disassociation.’ ‘Well, love, but you know the idiom “not yourself” — “He’s not himself today,” for example,’ crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. ‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.’ ‘I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is “existential,” Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.’ She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her. She smiled. ‘My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away. I’d never have gotten to go to University had he not died when I was a girl. He believed education was a waste for girls. It was a function of his era; it wasn’t his fault. His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university.’ She’s been smiling pleasantly this whole time, emptying the butt from the ashtray into the wastebasket, wiping the bowl’s inside with a Kleenex, straightening straight piles of folders on her desk.

We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning—clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

Beyond grief lay Coolidge’s accurate perception that in the 1920s Mellon’s and his own policies were yielding the good that the men had predicted. Today we estimate that the highest level of unemployment under President Coolidge had been 5 percent in the year he was elected. From there it dropped to 3.2 percent in 1925 and then into the twos and ones. Citizens could afford all the new products. There was nothing bubbly about the potential for productivity gains. By the end of 1925 Ford’s peak production was 8,500 a day, up substantially from the 6,000 from a few years before. Overall in the years from 1923 to 1929 car production would double.

When equal sacrifices are required, equal rights must be given likewise. This has been such commonplace of thought for a hundred and twenty years that one is ashamed to find it still in need of emphasis. I any case, if this principle is applied in an army, and the great saying about the Marshal’s baton that every recruit carries in his knapsack is not an mere empty phrase, everybody feels that he is in his place, whether he is born to command or to obey. If I give any offence by this, I may add that this would be an army composed entirely of Fahnenjunker. Democratic sentiments? I hate democracy as I do the plague – besides, the democratic ideal of an army would be one consisting entirely, not of Fahnenjunker, but of officers with lax discipline and great personal liberty. For my taste, on the contrary, and for that of young Germans in general to-day, an army could not be too iron, too dictatorial, ad too absolute – but if it is to be so, then there must be a system of promotion that is not sheltered behind any sort of privilege, but opened up to the keenest competition. If we are to come to grief in this war it can only be from moral causes; for materially, whatever any one may say, we are strong enough. And the decisive factor will be the defects of leadership; or to express it more accurately, the relation in which officers and men stand to each other. It would not be for the first time in our experience, and it would be another proof that peoples too (for it is on the shoulders of the whole people, not jsut the ruling class) always repeat the same mistakes just as individuals do. The battle of Jena is an instance. This defeat should not be regarded as a great disaster, but as a just and well-deserved warning of the fate to cut loose from an impossible state of affairs; for in that battle a new principle of leadership encountered and overthrew an antiquated one. Every war that is lost is lost deservedly. One must always bear that in mind if one wishes to be the winner.

After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully. Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a mastery of her own artistry of living, becomes even more than beauty something about which though we are even now no more capable of addressing than before, our admiration as original Earth-loving human beings should nonetheless never remain silent. And for that beauty we should never sing about, but only sing directly to it. Straightforward, cold, and inornate description in the presence of such living evidence of the flowering speech of the Holy in the Seed would be death of both the beauty and the speaker. Even if we always fail when we speak, we must be willing to fail magnificently, for even an eloquent failure, if in the service of life, feeds the Divine. Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path? If we can find the hearts, tongues, and brightness of our original souls, broken or not, then no matter from what mess we might have sprung today, we would be like those old-time speakers of life; every one of us would have it in our nature to feel obligated by such true living beauty as to know we have to say something in its presence if only for our utter feeling of awe. For, finally learning to approach something respectfully with love, slowly with the courtesy of an ornate indirectness, not describing what we see but praising the magnificence of her half-smiles of grief and persistent radiance rolling up from the weight-bearing thumping of her fine, well-oiled dusty old feet shuffling toward the dawn reeds at the edge of her part of the lake to fetch a head-balanced little clay jar of water to cook the family breakfast, we would know why the powerful Father Sun himself hurries to get his daily glimpse of her, only rising early because she does.

In 2022, New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren decried a culture of divorcing for unhappiness, writing, “I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage. There’s an older couple I know who are in their fifth decade of marriage. They are funny and kind and, by almost any standard, the picture of #relationshipgoals. Early on in our marriage they told us, ‘There are times in marriage when the Bible’s call to love your enemies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.’ ” Life is, of course, not easy, and no one is going to like their partner every day. But Warren’s column makes misery in marriage sound like a necessary evil of being partnered with a man. It’s not. I refuse to believe that it has to be that way. I have two dear friends who I have known for over twenty years; we fight sometimes and disagree. Between us we’ve had three divorces and four marriages and three children. Never once have they felt like the enemy to me. And if it is that way, if the experience of being with a man means I hate him for at least a third of our marriage and he hates me, too, I’d rather not have it. No, thank you. There is no benefit to that martyrdom. To me, columns like Warren’s sound like the mentality that enables hazing rituals and cults where they sacrifice one of their own every fortnight. I was miserable, so you should be, too. I do not want that curse. I want happiness.

I no longer felt fifteen. Thirty-five, forty-five ; these numbers came, in turn, to feel somehow insufficient. Not even sixty-five, no, nor seventy-five, seemed to encompass what I was. I wasn't JeongDae any more, the runt of the year. I wasn't Park JeongDae, whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister. A strange violence welled up within me, not spurred by the fact of my death, but simply because of the thoughts that wouldn't stop tearing through me, the things I needed to know. Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why. The more of myself I devoted to these questions, the firmer this new strength within me became. The ceaseless flow of blood, blood that flowed from a place without eyes or cheeks, darkened, thickened, into a vicious treacle ooze.

IN THE HAZY SPACE after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the Internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole. —

Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new. Last year Liz’s beloved partner became very sick and started dying. I was far away, so each day I would send her messages that said, “I am sitting outside your door.” One day, my mom called and asked, “How is Liz?” I thought for a moment about how to answer. I realized I couldn’t because she’d asked me the wrong question. I said, “Mama, I think the question is not ‘How is Liz?’ The question is ‘Who is Liz? Who will she be when she emerges from this grief?’ ” Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain—whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades—it’s revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships or patterns or thoughts or life anymore. You are like a snake trying to fit back into old, dead skin or a butterfly trying to crawl back into its cocoon. You look around and see everything freshly, with the new eyes you have earned for yourself. There is no going back. Perhaps the only thing that makes grief any easier is to surrender completely to it. To resist trying to hold on to a single part of ourselves that existed before the doorbell rang. Sometimes to live again, we have to let ourselves die completely. We have to let ourselves become completely, utterly, new. When grief rings: Surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is utter transformation.

Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness. ... And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing! Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone. Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time--that is her sacrifice for us. There is sadness in all this, of course--and poets with long elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel. Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize S

In the land of Uz, there lived a man, righteous and God-fearing, and he had great wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children feasted, and he loved them very much and prayed for them. 'It may be that my sons have sinned in their feasting.' Now the devil came before the Lord together with the sons of God, and said to the Lord that he had gone up and down the earth and under the earth. 'And hast thou considered my servant Job?' God asked of him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to his great and holy servant. And the devil laughed at God's words. 'Give him over to me and Thou wilt see that Thy servant will murmur against Thee and curse Thy name.' And God gave up the just man He loved so, to the devil. And the devil smote his children and his cattle and scattered his wealth, all of a sudden like a thunderbolt from heaven. And Job rent his mantel and fell down upon the ground and cried aloud, 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever.' Fathers and teachers, forgive my tears now, for all my childhood rises up again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then, with the breast of a little child of eight, and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and gladness. The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction, and His servant crying out: 'Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish me,' and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: 'Let my prayer rise up before Thee,' and again incense from the priest's censer and the kneeling and the prayer. Ever since then - only yesterday I took it up - I've never been able to read that sacred tale without tears. And how much that is great, mysterious and unfathomable there is in it! Afterwards I heard the words of mockery and blame, proud words, 'How could God give up the most loved of His saints for the diversion of the devil, take from him his children, smite him with sore boils so that he cleansed the corruption from his sores with a pot-sherd - and for no object except to board to the devil! 'See what My saint can suffer for My Sake.' ' But the greatness of it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery - that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished. The Creator, just as on the first days of creation He ended each day with praise: 'That is good that I have created,' looks upon Job and again praises His creation. And Job, praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was ordained. Good heavens, what a book it is, and what lessons there are in it! What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with it to man! It is like a mold cast of the world and man and human nature, everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what mysteries are solved and revealed! God raises Job again, gives him wealth again. Many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them. But how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with those new ones, however dear the new ones might be? But he could, he could. It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising such each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving!

And then I saw it. My father's wood: thick by then with twenty years' growth, but still not fully mature. A half-grown wood of oak trees around that little clearing, which, with my new perspective, I could see made the shape of a heart. I stared down at the clearing. The heart was unmistakable; tapered at the base with the strawberry field in the centre; a stand of trees to form the cleft. How long had it taken my father, I thought, to plan the formation, to plant out the trees? How many calculations had he made to create this God's-eye view? I thought of the years I had been at school; the years I had felt his absence. I remembered the contempt I'd felt at his little hobby. And finally I understood what he'd tried to say to me on the night of my wedding. 'Love is the thing that only God sees.' I'd wondered at the time what he meant. My father seldom spoke of love; rarely showed affection. Perhaps that was Tante Anna's influence, or maybe the few words he'd had were all spent on Naomi. But here it was at last, I saw: the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, a silent testament to grief; a last, enduring promise. Love is the thing that only God sees. I supposeyou'dsay that's because he sees into our hearts. Well, if he ever looks in mine, he'll see no more than I've told you. Confession may be good for the soul. But love is even better. Love redeems us even when we think ourselves irredeemable. I never really loved my wife- not in the way that she deserved. My children and I were never close. Perhaps that was my fault, after all. But Mimi- yes, I loved Mimi. And I loved Rosette Rocher, who was so very like her. One day I hope Rosette will see the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, and know that love surrounds her, whether see can see it or not. And you, Reynaud. I hope one day you can feel what only God sees, but which grows from the hearts of people like us: the flawed; the scarred; the broken. I hope you find it one day, Reynaud. Till then, look after Rosette for me. Make sure she knows my story. Tell her to take care of my wood. And keep picking the strawberries.

And then I saw it. My father's wood: thick by then with twenty years' growth, but still not fully mature. A half-grown wood of oak trees around that little clearing, which, with my new perspective, I could see made the shape of a heart. I stared down at the clearing. The heart was unmistakable; tapered at the base with the strawberry field in the centre; a stand of trees to form the cleft. How long had it taken my father, I thought, to plan the formation, to plant out the trees? How many calculations had he made to create this God's-eye view? I thought of the years I had been at school; the years I had felt his absence. I remembered the contempt I'd felt at his little hobby. And finally I understood what he'd tried to say to me on the night of my wedding. 'Love is the thing that only God sees.' I'd wondered at the time what he meant. My father seldom spoke of love; rarely showed affection. Perhaps that was Tante Anna's influence, or maybe the few words he'd had were all spent on Naomi. But here it was at last, I saw: the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, a silent testament to grief; a last, enduring promise. Love is the thing that only God sees. I suppose you'd say that's because he sees into our hearts. Well, if he ever looks in mine, he'll see no more than I've told you. Confession may be good for the soul. But love is even better. Love redeems us even when we think ourselves irredeemable. I never really loved my wife- not in the way that she deserved. My children and I were never close. Perhaps that was my fault, after all. But Mimi- yes, I loved Mimi. And I loved Rosette Rocher, who was so very like her. One day I hope Rosette will see the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, and know that love surrounds her, whether see can see it or not. And you, Reynaud. I hope one day you can feel what only God sees, but which grows from the hearts of people like us: the flawed; the scarred; the broken. I hope you find it one day, Reynaud. Till then, look after Rosette for me. Make sure she knows my story. Tell her to take care of my wood. And keep picking the strawberries.

The deaths of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of twenty years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don’t matter with the deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person’s life is more important than another’s. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person’s death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.

The deaths [from AIDS] of these 81,542 New Yorkers, who were despised and abandoned, who did not have rights or representation, who died because of the neglect of their government and families, has been ignored. This gaping hole of silence has been filled by the deaths of 2,752 people murdered by outside forces. The disallowed grief of 20 years of AIDS deaths was replaced by ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead. In this way, 9/11 is the gentrification of AIDS. The replacement of deaths that don't matter with deaths that do. It is the centerpiece of supremacy ideology, the idea that one person's life is more important than another's. That one person deserves rights that another does not deserve. That one person deserves representation that the other cannot be allowed to access. That one person's death is negligible if he or she was poor, a person of color, a homosexual living in a state of oppositional sexual disobedience, while another death matters because that person was a trader, cop, or office worker presumed to be performing the job of Capital.

Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn't want her hair to look pretty,–that was out of the question,–she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she was like an idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie's cheeks began to pale, and her lips to tremble a little. "Oh, Maggie, you'll have to go down to dinner directly," said Tom. "Oh, my!" ...But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom and Lucy, and Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her; for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie–perhaps it was even more bitter–than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. "Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by," is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that "half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

I'm sorry.' It was those two words that shattered me. Shattered me in a way I didn't know I could still be broken, a rending of every tether and leash. Stay with the High Lord. The Suriel's last warning. Stay... and live to see everything righted. A lie. A lie, as Rhys had lied to me. Stay with the High Lord. Stay. For there... the torn scraps of the mating bond. Floating on a phantom wind inside me. I grasped at them- tugged at them, as if he'd answer. Stay. Stay, stay, stay. I clung to those scraps and remnants, clawing at the voice that lurked beyond. Stay. I looked up at Tarquin, lip curling back from my teeth. Looked at Helion. And Thesan. And Beon and Kallias, Viviane weeping at his side. And I snarkled, 'Bring him back.' Blank faces. I screamed at them, 'BRING HIM BACK.' Nothing. 'You did it for me,' I said, breathing hard. 'Now do it for him.' 'You were human,' Helion said carefully. 'It is not the same-' 'I don't care. Do it.' When they didn't move, I rallied the dregs of my power, readying to rip into their minds and force them, not caring what rules or laws it broke. I wouldn't care, only if- Tarquin stepped forward. He slowly extended his hand toward me. 'For what he gave,' Tarquin said quietly. 'Today and for many years before.' And as the seed of light appeared in his palm... I began crying again. Watched it drop onto Rhys's bare throat and vanish onto the skin beneath, an echo of light flaring once. Helion stepped forward. That kernel of light in his hand flickered as it fell onto Rhys's skin. Then Kallias. And Thesan. Until only Beron stood there. Mor drew her sword and laid it on his throat. He jerked, having not seen her move. 'I do not mind making one more kill today,' she said. Beron gave her a withering glare, but shoved off the sword and strode forward. He practically chucked that fleck of light onto Rhys. I didn't care about that, either. I didn't know the spell, the power it came from. But I was High Lady. I held out my palm. Willing the spark of life to appear. Nothing happened. I took a steadying breath, remembering how it had looked. 'Tell me how,' I growled to no one. Thesan coughed and stepped forward. Explaining the core of power and on and on and I didn't care, but I listened, until- There. Small as a sunflower seed, it appeared in my palm. A bit of me- my life. I laid it gently on Rhys's blood-crusted throat. And I realised, just as he appeared, what was missing. Tamlin stood there, summoned by either the death of a fellow High Lord or one of the others around me. He was splattered in mud and gore, his new bandolier of knives mostly empty. He studied Rhys, lifeless before me. Studied all of us- the palms still out. There was no kindness on his face. No mercy. 'Please,' was all I said to him. Then Tamlin glanced between us- me and my mate. His face did not change. 'Please,' I wept. 'I will- I will give you anything-' Something shifted in his eyes at that. But not kindness. No emotion at all. I laid my head on Rhysand's chest, listening for any kind of heartbeat through that armour. 'Anything,' I breathed to no one in particular. 'Anything.' Steps scuffed on the rocky ground. I braced myself for another set of hands trying to pull me away, and dug my fingers in harder. The steps remained behind me for long enough that I looked. Tamlin stood there. Staring down at me. Those green eyes swimming with some emotion I couldn't place. 'Be happy, Feyre,' he said quietly. And dropped that final kernel of light onto Rhysand.

Ione III. TO-DAY my skies are bare and ashen, And bend on me without a beam. Since love is held the master-passion, Its loss must be the pain supreme — And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream. But pardon, dear departed Guest, I will not rant, I will not rail; For good the grain must feel the flail; There are whom love has never blessed. I had and have a younger brother, One whom I loved and love to-day As never fond and doting mother Adored the babe who found its way From heavenly scenes into her day. Oh, he was full of youth's new wine, — A man on life's ascending slope, Flushed with ambition, full of hope; And every wish of his was mine. A kingly youth; the way before him Was thronged with victories to be won; so joyous, too, the heavens o'er him Were bright with an unchanging sun, — His days with rhyme were overrun. Toil had not taught him Nature's prose, Tears had not dimmed his brilliant eyes, And sorrow had not made him wise; His life was in the budding rose. I know not how I came to waken, Some instinct pricked my soul to sight; My heart by some vague thrill was shaken, — A thrill so true and yet so slight, I hardly deemed I read aright. As when a sleeper, ign'rant why, Not knowing what mysterious hand Has called him out of slumberland, Starts up to find some danger nigh. Love is a guest that comes, unbidden, But, having come, asserts his right; He will not be repressed nor hidden. And so my brother's dawning plight Became uncovered to my sight. Some sound-mote in his passing tone Caught in the meshes of my ear; Some little glance, a shade too dear, Betrayed the love he bore Ione. What could I do? He was my brother, And young, and full of hope and trust; I could not, dared not try to smother His flame, and turn his heart to dust. I knew how oft life gives a crust To starving men who cry for bread; But he was young, so few his days, He had not learned the great world's ways, Nor Disappointment's volumes read. However fair and rich the booty, I could not make his loss my gain. For love is dear, but dearer, duty, And here my way was clear and plain. I saw how I could save him pain. And so, with all my day grown dim, That this loved brother's sun might shine, I joined his suit, gave over mine, And sought Ione, to plead for him. I found her in an eastern bower, Where all day long the am'rous sun Lay by to woo a timid flower. This day his course was well-nigh run, But still with lingering art he spun Gold fancies on the shadowed wall. The vines waved soft and green above, And there where one might tell his love, I told my griefs — I told her all! I told her all, and as she hearkened, A tear-drop fell upon her dress. With grief her flushing brow was darkened; One sob that she could not repress Betrayed the depths of her distress. Upon her grief my sorrow fed, And I was bowed with unlived years, My heart swelled with a sea of tears, The tears my manhood could not shed. The world is Rome, and Fate is Nero, Disporting in the hour of doom. God made us men; times make the hero — But in that awful space of gloom I gave no thought but sorrow's room. All — all was dim within that bower, What time the sun divorced the day; And all the shadows, glooming gray, Proclaimed the sadness of the hour. She could not speak — no word was needed; Her look, half strength and half despair, Told me I had not vainly pleaded, That she would not ignore my prayer. And so she turned and left me there, And as she went, so passed my bliss; She loved me, I could not mistake — But for her own and my love's sake, Her womanhood could rise to this! My wounded heart fled swift to cover, And life at times seemed very drear. My brother proved an ardent lover — What had so young a man to fear? He wed Ione within the year. No shadow clouds her tranquil brow, Men speak her husband's name with pride, While she sits honored at his side —

Two days ago, I was lunching at the Writers Union with the eminent historian Tomashevski. That's the sort of man you should know. Respected, charming, hasn't produced a piece of work in ten years. He has a system, which he explained to me. First, he submits an outline for a biography to the Academy to be absolutely sure his approach is consistent with Party policy. A crucial first step, as you'll see later. Now, the person he studies is always an important figure - that is, someone from Moscow - hence Tomashevski must do his Russian research close to home for two years. But this historical character also traveled, yes, lived for some years in Paris or London; hence Tomashevski must do the same, apply for and receive permission for foreign residence. Four years have passed. The Academy and the Party are rubbing their hands in anticipation of this seminal study of the important figure by the eminent Tomashevski. And now Tomashevski must retire to the solitude of a dacha outside Moscow to tend his garden and creatively brood over his cartons of research. Two more years pass in seminal thought. And just as Tomashevski is about to commit himself to paper, he checks with the Academy again only to learn that Party policy has totally about-faced; his hero is a traitor, and with regrets all around, Tomashevski must sacrifice his years of labor for the greater good. Naturally, they are only too happy to urge Tomashevski to start a new project, to plow under his grief with fresh labor. Tomashevski is now studying a very important historical figure who lived for some time in the South of France. He says there is always a bright future for Soviet historians, and I believe him.

They had her in Intensive Care. I sat outside Intensive Care in their slick little awful waiting room. They had red slippery chairs, cheap covering, and a stand full of pebbles with green plastic leaves growing up. I sat there hour after hour and read The Reader's Digest. The jokes. Thinking this is how it is, this is it, really, she's dying. Now, this moment, behind those doors, dying. Nothing stops or holds off for it the way you somehow and against all your sense believe it will. I thought about Mother's life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway -- new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at the Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don't seem that much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life. It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you've had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

Variations on a tired, old theme Here’s another example of addict manipulation that plagues parents. The phone rings. It’s the addict. He says he has a job. You’re thrilled. But you’re also apprehensive. Because you know he hasn’t simply called to tell you good news. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Then comes the zinger you knew would be coming. The request. He says everybody at this company wears business suits and ties, none of which he has. He says if you can’t wire him $1800 right away, he won’t be able to take the job. The implications are clear. Suddenly, you’ve become the deciding factor as to whether or not the addict will be able to take the job. Have a future. Have a life. You’ve got that old, familiar sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This is not the child you gladly would have financed in any way possible to get him started in life. This is the child who has been strung out on drugs for years and has shown absolutely no interest in such things as having a conventional job. He has also, if you remember correctly, come to you quite a few times with variations on this same tired, old story. One variation called for a car so he could get to work. (Why is it that addicts are always being offered jobs in the middle of nowhere that can’t be reached by public transportation?) Another variation called for the money to purchase a round-trip airline ticket to interview for a job three thousand miles away. Being presented with what amounts to a no-choice request, the question is: Are you going to contribute in what you know is probably another scam, or are you going to say sorry and hang up? To step out of the role of banker/victim/rescuer, you have to quit the job of banker/victim/rescuer. You have to change the coda. You have to forget all the stipulations there are to being a parent. You have to harden your heart and tell yourself parenthood no longer applies to you—not while your child is addicted. Not an easy thing to do. P.S. You know in your heart there is no job starting on Monday. But even if there is, it’s hardly your responsibility if the addict goes well dressed, badly dressed, or undressed. Facing the unfaceable: The situation may never change In summary, you had a child and that child became an addict. Your love for the child didn’t vanish. But you’ve had to wean yourself away from the person your child has become through his or her drugs and/ or alcohol abuse. Your journey with the addicted child has led you through various stages of pain, grief, and despair and into new phases of strength, acceptance, and healing. There’s a good chance that you might not be as healthy-minded as you are today had it not been for the tribulations with the addict. But you’ll never know. The one thing you do know is that you wouldn’t volunteer to go through it again, even with all the awareness you’ve gained. You would never have sacrificed your child just so that you could become a better, stronger person. But this is the way it has turned out. You’re doing okay with it, almost twenty-four hours a day. It’s just the odd few minutes that are hard to get through, like the ones in the middle of the night when you awaken to find that the grief hasn’t really gone away—it’s just under smart, new management. Or when you’re walking along a street or in a mall and you see someone who reminds you of your addicted child, but isn’t a substance abuser, and you feel that void in your heart. You ache for what might have been with your child, the happy life, the fulfilled career. And you ache for the events that never took place—the high school graduation, the engagement party, the wedding, the grandkids. These are the celebrations of life that you’ll probably never get to enjoy. Although you never know. DON’T LET    YOUR KIDS  KILL  YOU  A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children PART 2

… The frayed and gritty edges of everyone’s world were being worried away by neighbors you’d never noticed until the air spilled over with the tragedy of their loss. The war had taken them or their children; killed them, lost them, torn off body parts, shipped them back brain-fried…. … Tales fell from hearts in heavy, wet tones of grief and confusion…. … Even when rare moments of relative calm and clarity crept briefly through our days, they crawled in with head hanging through that most familiar of all tunnels, our sense of loss. Each new friend seemed only to step in and announce himself with his last breath. Why hadn’t we loved him earlier when there had been more time? That overriding sense of loss was the dismal cloud through which you viewed the world. Dreading life’s relentless advance, but knowing your locks could never keep it out…. … As the late 60’s gave in and died, and I trudged through my first year as an art student in college, even the old folks were growing up. Their World War II glories clouded over. Someone had shot the president, his brother, and a great civil rights leader, dragging us all out of our warm, snuggly innocence. People seemed infested by life, burdened by the stifling weight of it, until we could only force shallow, labored breaths. Each new day was just an old one playing through again, a dust-laden August, a storm always riding right on top of you that never quite cut loose. It settled into your joints until they grew achy, too heavy to lift; tarring all hearts with a dark, heavy plaque. Days stuck together as walking and breathing grew tedious. Until even my bubbly sister couldn’t offer up a smile without a shadow lurking inside it. We trudged through life as our mighty nation killed our sons and broke our buddies, defending itself from skinny barefoot farmers with sticks, in rice swamps somewhere on the other side of existence, where you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Some lost tiny nowhere that hadn’t even existed when you’d been a kid; when the world had been innocent and untainted. Back when Father Knew Best, Beaver’s mom fed his dad all the answers, and Annie Oakley never had to shoot to kill…. - From “Entertaining Naked People

I gave humble and hearty thanks that God had been pleased to discover to me even that it was possible I might be more happy in this solitary condition, than I should have been in a liberty of society, and in all the pleasures of the world; that He could fully make up to me the deficiencies of my solitary state, and the want of human society, by His presence, and the communications of His grace to my soul, supporting, comforting, and encouraging me to depend upon His providence here, and hope for His eternal presence hereafter. It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days. And now I changed both my sorrows and my joys; my very desires altered, my affections changed their gusts, and my delights were perfectly new from what they were at my first coming, or indeed for the two years past. Before, as I walked about, either on my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me, to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in, and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together; and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst out into tears, or vent myself by words, it would go off, and the grief, having exhausted itself, would abate. But now I began to exercise myself with new thoughts. I daily read the Word of God, and applied all the comforts of it to my present state. One morning, being very sad, I opened the Bible upon these words, "I will never, never leave thee, nor forsake thee." Immediately it occurred that these words were to me; why else should they be directed in such a manner, just as the moment when I was mourning over my condition, as one forsaken of God and man? "Well, then," said I, "if God does not forsake me, of what ill consequence can it be, or what matters it, though the world should all forsake me, seeing on the other hand if I had all the world, and should lose the favor and blessing of God, there would be no comparison in the loss?" From that moment I began to conclude in my mind that it was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken solitary condition, than it was probable I should ever have been in any other particular state in the world, and with this thought I was going to give thanks to God for bringing me to this place.

Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.

For it is said that after the departure of the Valar there was silence, and for an age Ilúvatar sat alone in thought. Then he spoke and said: “Behold I love the Earth, which shall be a mansion for the Quendi and the Atani! But the Quendi shall be the fairest of all earthly creatures, and they shall have and shall conceive and bring forth more beauty than all my Children; and they shall have the greater bliss in this world. But to the Atani I will give a new gift.” Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else. . . . But Ilúvatar knew that Men, being set amid the turmoils of the powers of the world, would stray often, and would not use their gifts in harmony; and he said: “These too in their time shall find that all that they do redounds at the end only to the glory of my work.” . . . It is one with this gift of freedom that the children of Men dwell only a short space in the world alive, and are not bound to it, and depart soon whither the Elves know not. Whereas the Elves remain until the end of days, and their love of the Earth and all the world is more single and more poignant therefore, and as the years lengthen ever more sorrowful. For the Elves die not till the world dies, unless they are slain or waste in grief. . . . But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy. But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope. Yet of old the Valar declared to the Elves in Valinor that Men shall join in the Second Music of the Ainur; whereas Ilúvatar has not revealed what he purposes for the Elves after the World’s end, and Melkor has not discovered it.