Struggling With Grief Quotes

During the Depression of the 1930s everyone suffered, even the rich. It was hard times for all and people helped each other if they could. Americans coming through that together meant something. Now they were being asked to struggle again. But because so many servicemen were killed at Pearl Harbor, Americans had a cause that they all shared – fight the Fascists and keep the threat and the war from coming home. Yet, now the grim reality, the depths of the sacrifices, and the grief of their losses was devastating.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Grief, I'd come to realize was like dust, When you're in the thick of a dust storm, you're completely disoriented by the onslaught, struggling to see or breathe. But as the force recedes, and you slowly find your bearing and see a path forward, the dust begins to settle into the crevices. And it will never disappear completely- as the years pass, you'll find it in unexpected places at unexpected moments.

Does the open wound in another's breast soften the pain of the gaping wound in our own? Or does the blood which is welling from another man's side staunch that which is pouring from our own? Does the general anguish of our fellow creatures lessen our own private and particular anguish? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears.

Some people are silently struggling with burdens that would break our backs.

If you have survived an abuser, and you tried to make things right… If you forgave, and you struggled, and even if the expression of your grief and your anger tumbled out at times in too much rage and too many words… If you spent years hanging on to the concepts of faith, hope, and love, even after you knew in your heart that those intangibles, upon which life is formed and sustained, would fail in the end… And especially, if you stood between your children - or anyone - and him, and took the physical, emotional, and spiritual pummeling in their stead, then you are a hero.

Duty bound, Aeneas, though he struggled with desire to calm and comfort her in all her pain, to speak to her and turn her mind from grief, and though he sighed his heart out, shaken still with love if her, yet took the course heaven gave him and turned back to the fleet.

When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.

Grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, each Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have been, should have been, a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.

The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes,--and to speak.

I'm still a broken girl struggling through the stages of my grief, trying to reenter the real world without the man who is still part of me.

For those struggling with grief, there’s no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss.

I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop is not in sight Because there is no mountaintop Poor Sisyphus grief I did not know I would struggle Through a ragged underbrush Without an upward path ... Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That’s why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day.

We all have gifts and talents. When we cultivate those gifts and share them with the world, we create a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts that we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don’t use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.

Grief was a vat of quicksand; the more one struggled against it, the deeper it pulled one under.

...grief looks like nothing from the outside, it looks like surrender, but in fact it is the most terrible struggle. It is friction. It is a spiritual grinding, and who's to say it cannot produce a spark and heat that, given fuel could burn a good man to the ground.

When I heard the apartment door open everything felt lethargic, like we were moving underwater, struggling slowly against the weight. The sitting room door opened and Braden walked in, his face so pale and eyes so glazed, that I knew before I even looked at tear-streaked Ellie. I knew what fear felt like when it was pulsing from a person, I knew how grief could thicken the air, how it could slam into your chest and cause pain through your whole body. Your eyes, your head, your arms, your legs, even your gums.

I wondered how the public's consumption of others' pain and suffering cross the line from empathy to voyeurism. How quickly have we, as a society, become numb to the struggles of others, our capacity for compassion eroded by the sheer volume of human drama we're exposed to daily? We were just characters in a soap opera now, except the drama was real, and the consequences permanent. Our grief had been reduced to a mere commodity, packaged and sold, consumed and discarded.

Hope is a torturous thing. It wrenches one from despair just long enough to allow one to take a breath before plunging her back beneath the icy waters. If it wasn't for those breaths, it would be easy to let ice claim the soul. Easy to let surrender swallow the struggle. But hope - cruel mistress that she is - is not satisfied with so neat an ending. Like a house cat with a tiny prisoner, she wants only to torment the soul again, and again, until it dies from a burst heart.

No. Grief and anger doesn’t shock me.” Catherine paused. “Rachel, do you remember that day at the convent when we saw the old biplane? Remember what I said?” Rachel laughed without amusement. “I don’t even remember what I said.” “’Who can doubt the presence of God in the sight of men whom He has given wings.’ I recall that so precisely because I’ve had time to consider my error.” She smiled. “God didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brain and the spirit to give himself wings. Just as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up. I’ve come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death…is the true measure of the Divine within us. Some, like Crossen, choose to do harm to themselves and others. Others, like Kenji, bear up under their pain and help others to bear it. I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn’t give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life— the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it— can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Everybody struggles with this stuff, you know. With social discomfort and grief and fitting in. People with syndromes, people with disorders, people with diagnoses, and without. People who would be classified as neurotypical. Idiots and geniuses, maids and doctors. Nobody's got it all figured out.

NEWT shuffles over awkwardly to the bereft THESEUS. NEWT hesitates, struggling to find words of comfort. Then for the first time in his life, he puts his arms around his brother. They hug. NEWT: I've chosen my side.

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grief," as Shakespeare put it. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things.

Grief is like the ocean. The waves ebb and flow. Sometimes the water is calm. Other times it's turbulent. In order to survive, I had to learn to swim. In moments when I struggled with massive waves of grief, I rode it out.

Life isn't about how comfortable I can be it is about learning how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Resistance is vain in any case; it only leads to useless struggle while inviting grief and sorrow.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.

The proper society girl in me was loath to admit it, but his flirtations kept me afloat in a sea of conflicting feelings. Passion and annoyance were fire, and fire was alive and crackling with power. Fire breathed. Grief was a vat of quicksand; the more one struggled against it, the deeper it pulled one under. I'd much rather be set ablaze than buried alive. Though the mere thought of being in a compromising position with Thomas was enough to make my face warm.

Maybe when we face a tragedy, someone, somewhere is preventing a bigger tragedy from happening.

Om is the presence which steals away. It steals away the ordinary mundane existence of strife, struggle and duality; it steals away anxiety, aggression, fear, grief and sorrow; it steals away the debris of anger, hatred, confusion and ignorance, to fill us with the nectar of joy, immortality and life eternal.

She should like a grief-struck madwoman, broken and hopeless, but instead she looks like an angel cast down from Heaven struggling back to her feet with blood on her teeth, ready to make war with God himself

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other. Age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities. Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last - the only unpoisoned gift ever had for them - and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed – a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished - to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path through the same desert and accomplish what the first myriad and all the myriads that came after it accomplished - nothing!

shows the destructive forces that affect young women. As a girl, Ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction ; rather she struggles to meet the demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is determined utterly by their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to please. When Hamlet spurns her because she is an obedient daughter, she goes mad with grief. Dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a stream filled with flowers.

Burying and Planting The culmination of one love, one dream, one self, is the anonymous seed of the next. There is very little difference between burying and planting. For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow. And further, the thing put to rest—whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing—becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form. As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. This is very helpful when considering the many forms of self we inhabit over a lifetime. One self carries us to the extent of its usefulness and dies. We are then forced to put that once beloved skin to rest, to join it with the ground of spirit from which it came, so it may fertilize the next skin of self that will carry us into tomorrow. There is always grief for what is lost and always surprise at what is to be born. But much of our pain in living comes from wearing a dead and useless skin, refusing to put it to rest, or from burying such things with the intent of hiding them rather than relinquishing them. For every new way of being, there is a failed attempt mulching beneath the tongue. For every sprig that breaks surface, there is an old stick stirring underground. For every moment of joy sprouting, there is a new moment of struggle taking root. We live, embrace, and put to rest our dearest things, including how we see ourselves, so we can resurrect our lives anew.

I can't get my head around why I didn't just call your name that day. Why I just came tottering on behind, struggling for breath and dumb as a mute. If I call your name next time, will you please just turn around? You don't need to say 'yes, mum?' or anything like that. Just turn round so I can see you.

There’s sometimes a certain relief when the thing you’ve been so afraid of happens. You can finally surrender to the grief without struggling to stave it off. Though your body hollows, there is a sort of rest there, an absence of struggle.

Listen,' said Morrel; 'it is not the first time you have contemplated our present position, which is a serious and urgent one; I do not think it is a moment to give way to useless sorrow; leave that for those who like to suffer at their leisure and indulge their grief in secret. There are such in the world, and God will doubtless reward them in heaven for their resignation on earth, but those who mean to contend must not lose one precious moment, but must return immediately the blow which fortune strikes. Do you intend to struggle against our ill-fortune?..

Back on the caregiving roller coaster, I struggled to remember the lesson I had just learned so painfully with Mom: the end of caregiving isn't freedom. The end of caregiving is grief.

After you died, I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t breathe, and I’ve struggled to draw, or paint, or write. Grief can change a person into someone even they can’t recognize

What was there to say? Trapped inside a person, grief can feel like a rising tide of water, something vast and dramatic requiring release. But once spoken, it tends to reveal itself to be the same, small essential things, over and over. He missed her. He struggled without her. He wished she were still there.

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying, Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane. It can seem her whole life was her dying. She tried so hard, then she tired of trying; Now I'm tired, too, of trying to explain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. The anxiety, the rage, the denying; Though I never blamed her for my pain, It can seem her whole life was her dying. And mine was struggling to save her; prying, Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. If I said she was easy, I'd be lying; The lens between her and the world was stained: It can seem her whole life was her dying. But the fact, the fact, is stupefying: Her absence tears at me like a chain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. It can seem her whole life was her dying. - Villanelle for a Suicide's Mother

If we are not to sacrifice some part of ourselves or our community, we will have to go through the grief, the fear of exposure, and struggle, with only a thin layer of trust that we will emerge whole and unbroken. I know of no other way to do this than to start by saying, I will give up nothing. I will give up no one.

At no time in the history of man has the world been so full of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common grief. We say of them that they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully, and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual song of joy […] like the clown, we go through the motions, forever simulating, forever postponing the grand event- we die struggling to get born. We never were, never are. We are always in the process of becoming. Forever outside

Rather than anchoring our hope beyond the struggle, always projecting ahead, perhaps locating joy within the struggle through our full presence can be our essential gesture at this moment in time. To feel the pain of now and not look away. To act not with the hope of moving forward, always forward, but to see the wisdom of stepping sideways as we create a different space, a more conscious space in the direction of pause, where we can breathe and gather ourselves so we can gather others around us and create a community of care, even within our own families, especially within our own families.

I struggle with this, the public grief by white people over Black Death. I have been, and am still, a victim of what my guilt can drive me to. Depending on the day, on the cause, on who I love that might be affected. There is, however, a manner in which this guilt is performed that sets me to wondering what the value of living blackness is when it rests against white outrage centered on the ending of black life. It is both essential for us to turn toward our people and ask them to do better, while also realizing that there is a very real currency that comes with being the loudest person to do it in public.

Months later, as I write this, I find it curious how people tend toward expecting those who are struggling to be forthright with their struggle... It’s like handing a person who is mute some sheet music and then blaming them when they don’t sing.

In the mornings I awoke with salty crust of tears around my eyes--my grief struggling to surface when I was in my weakest, lost in sleep. But by day I would not allow myself to feel. My misery was muted; it had to be. If I faced it in earnest, I would truly drown.

Art shows us back to ourselves, and the best art doesn’t flinch or look away. Rather, it acknowledges the complexity of struggles like poverty, weariness, and grief while defiantly holding forth beauty—reminding us that beauty is both scarce and everywhere we look.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.

Ah! This is retribution for Promethean fire! Besides being patient, you must also love this sadness and respect your doubts and questions. They are an abundant excess, a luxury of life, and they appear more at the summits of happiness, when you have no crude desires. They are not born in the midst of mundanity. They have no place where there is grief and want. The masses go along without knowing the fog of doubts or the anguish of questions. But for anyone who has encountered them at the right time they are dear visitors, not a hammer.' 'But there's no coping with them. They bring anguish and indifference to nearly everything.' she added indecisively. 'But for how long? Afterward they refresh life,' he said. 'They lead to an abyss from which nothing can be gained, and they force you to look again at life, with even greater love. They summon up your tested powers to struggle with it, as if expressly to let them sleep afterward.' 'This fog and these specters torment me!' she complained. 'Everything is bright and all of a sudden a sinister shadow is cast over life! Are there no means against this?' 'What do you mean? Your buttress is in life! Without it, life is sickening, even without any questions!' p. 508

During the course of the day, he said, each spouse had confessed independently to him to taking antidepressants but didn’t want the other to know. It turned out that they were hiding the same medication in the same house. No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We’ll talk with almost anyone about our physical health (can anyone imagine spouses hiding their reflux medication from each other?), even our sex lives, but bring up anxiety or depression or an intractable sense of grief, and the expression on the face looking back at you will probably read, Get me out of this conversation, pronto.

And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. Eventually I just checked out of the world altogether, leaving behind only my body, like a snail abandoning its shell. Sometimes I would catch myself in the mirror, surprised to see someone staring back at me, a stranger whose face I struggled to connect as my own, whose body was visible and intact despite the feeling that I moved through the world as a ghost.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-trust, and even our worthiness. I am enough can slowly turn into Am I really enough? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friend just found out that his wife has cancer. You’re feeling shame for forgetting your son’s school play? Please—that’s a first-world problem; there are people dying of starvation every minute. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

I struggled to find my words in all that black space. It took all my strength to keep my eyes from closing and the darkness from absorbing me. I had no hope. I felt no joy. I saw no future that didn't fill me with anguish, so I didn't think at all. I didn't make words or cast spells. I just was. And that was all I could manage.

Meanwhile there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And though I'd flared with anger when the priest at Heinz's funeral had warned not to be "angry at God" because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.

The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down.

I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

If we let go of faith in Him, we may slip back into the darkness and the danger. Let go of your struggle and hold tight to your faith.

O Emily! these are moments, in which joy and grief struggle so powerfully for pre-eminence, that the heart can scarcely support the contest!

He never said, What if I go home, and all of it is ash? But I saw the thought in him, living like a second body, and feeding in the dark.

It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.

Grief isn’t linear. Some days are good. Some days he has the energy to give his full effort, and other days he probably struggles to get out of bed.

Wanting to talk about your pain without annoying people, the worst feeling known to mankind

You do not know your own beauty, you struggle in grief, but I, I have seen it all, and I know: You yourself are the secret essence.

Clara knew that grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, each Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have been, should have been, a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.

My Darling, It is late at night and though the words are coming hard to me, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s time that I finally answer your question. Of course I forgive you. I forgive you now, and I forgave you the moment I read your letter. In my heart, I had no other choice. Leaving you once was hard enough; to have done it a second time would have been impossible. I loved you too much to have let you go again. Though I’m still grieving over what might have been, I find myself thankful that you came into my life for even a short period of time. In the beginning, I’d assumed that we were somehow brought together to help you through your time of grief. Yet now, one year later, I’ve come to believe that it was the other way around. Ironically, I am in the same position you were, the first time we met. As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on. Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever. It would be easy for me to do that because loving someone else might diminish my memories of you. Yet, this is the paradox: Even though I miss you greatly, it’s because of you that I don’t dread the future. Because you were able to fall in love with me, you have given me hope, my darling. You taught me that it’s possible to move forward in life, no matter how terrible your grief. And in your own way, you’ve made me believe that true love cannot be denied. Right now, I don’t think I’m ready, but this is my choice. Do not blame yourself. Because of you, I am hopeful that there will come a day when my sadness is replaced by something beautiful. Because of you, I have the strength to go on. I don’t know if spirits do indeed roam the world, but even if they do, I will sense your presence everywhere. When I listen to the ocean, it will be your whispers; when I see a dazzling sunset, it will be your image in the sky. You are not gone forever, no matter who comes into my life. you are standing with God, alongside my soul, helping to guide me toward a future that I cannot predict. This is not a good-bye, my darling, this is a thank-you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. I love you

The difficulties continued but caused them less grief: Life had taken on the task of teaching them that the joy of love was not meant to lull you to sleep, but to keep you struggling together.

He possesses a noble heart, madame," replied the count, "and he has acted rightly. He feels that every man owes a tribute to his country; some contribute their talents, others their industry; these devote their blood, those their nightly labors, to the same cause. Had he remained with you, his life must have become a hateful burden, nor would he have participated in your griefs. He will increase in strength and honor by struggling with adversity, which he will convert into prosperity. Leave him to build up the future for you, and I venture to say you will confide it to safe hands.

For me, being a survivor has made me a reluctant participant/observer in my own inner struggle between wanting that to be the most important fact of my life and wanting it to be the least important.

That was true, Iris would sometimes think, about marriage: it was only a boat, too. A wooden boat, difficult to build, even more difficult to maintain, whose beauty derived at least in part from its unlikelihood. Long ago the pragmatic justifications for both marriage and wooden-boat building had been lost or superseded. Why invest countless hours, years, and dollars in planing and carving, gluing and fastening, caulking and fairing, when a fiberglass boat can be had at a fraction of the cost? Why struggle to maintain love and commitment over decades when there were far easier ways to live, ones that required no effort or attention to prevent corrosion and rot? Why continue to pour your heart into these obsolete arts? Because their beauty, the way they connect you to your history and to the living world, justifies your efforts. A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance. At first your notions of your life with another were no more substantial than a pattern laid down in plywood. Then year by year you constructed the frame around the form, and began layering memories, griefs, and small triumphs like strips of veneer planking bent around the hull of everyday routine. You sanded down the rough edges, patched the misunderstandings, faired the petty betrayals. Sometimes you sprung a leak. You fell apart in rough weather or were smashed on devouring rocks. But then, as now, in the teeth of a storm, when it seemed like all was lost, the timber swelled, the leak sealed up, and you found that your craft was, after all, sea-kindly.

I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop is not in sight Because there is no mountaintop Poor Sisyphus grief I did not know I would struggle Through a ragged underbrush Without an upward path Because there is no path There is only a blunt rock With a river to fall into And Time with its medieval chambers Time with its jagged edges And blunt instruments I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves Though sometimes when I sleep I'm with him again And then I wake Poor Sisyphus grief I'm not ready for your heaviness Cemented to my body Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That's why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day

Although containing and denying grief is a time-honored activist practice that works for some people, I would argue that feelings of grief and trauma are not a distraction from the struggle. For example, transformative justice work—strategies that create justice, healing, and safety for survivors of abuse without predominantly relying on the state—is hard as hell! What would it be like if we built healing justice practices into it from the beginning? Everything from praying to the goddesses of transformation to help us hold these giant processes and help someone acting abusively choose to change to having cleansing ceremonies along the way.

Being my friend meant not just comforting me in my grief but dealing with a level of anger that I’d never felt before and struggled to control. My anger scared me—and made me need the comfort of my friends even more.

Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief. In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what? But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide. The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives. Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five. When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.

You may quickly realize after the death of a loved one that the day they died is not the hardest part. It may be the worst day of your life, but it is not the hardest part. The hardest part is returning to life again. Because while you had no say in your loved one’s dying, you do have a say in your living. And choosing to live after someone you love has died is one of the hardest choices we make. It’s okay if life after loss feels more like a struggle than the day your loved one died . . . because often, it is.

Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

There was so much to do...so many things that Christ had called me to do. It would take more pain, more loneliness. Maybe death. Why was it so hard? Why? Then I saw Jesus. He was struggling up a hill with a great burden. His face was lined with grief, His back bent.

Edward: But I'm obsessed by the thought of my own significance. Rielly: Precisely. And I could make you feel important, And you would imagine it a marvelous cure; And you would go on, doing such amount of mischief As lay within your power -- until you came to grief. Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm--but the harm does not interest them Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves.

the doctor suggested a bereavement counseling group. Why struggle with bereavement alone when you can grapple with grief in a group, he asked. At first, I hated the idea. If I wanted to surround myself with needy, self-pitying morons wittering on about their feelings, I’d join Facebook.

She went to the church to sit in the cave of stone, filled with the voices of strangers. Murmurs coming through the air, bowling in the ceiling and sifting down with the speckled greens and blues, the deep dark red of the stained glass at the end of the nave. She sat in the hard wooden pew and waited for the hymns. And when the singing started, she could weep. She went to the church to open her mouth and feel her heart again, constricted, struggling, banging against her throat, the tears there in the place of words, her voice struggling out in the vast air, stopped by grief.

David’s life is example enough of what it is to live in a broken world. He experienced the clashing of private grief and public duty. He knew deceit and turmoil, heartache, struggling. But he also knew how to cling to God, how to trust in God and how to worship God. There is nothing that ever catches God by surprise since He knows everything (omniscient) and sees everything. Our entire life is laid open bare before God, as was David's. God already knows about the 'mess­ups' and shortcomings that will cause us to stumble. It is our repentant attitude that makes all the difference.

I understood for the first time how correct it was to say that she was 'survived by her husband'. I had seen that expression used in obituaries without ever giving it a thought, but it turned out to be a term of great precision. I had survived Mary Rose only barely. I was struggling to survive her.

Grief has its own watch,” Mo says, repeating the words her psychiatrist said to her eight years ago, when she was struggling to come to terms with the accident and Finn’s and Oz’s deaths. “We can’t rush it, and we can’t stop it. It needs to run its course, and all we can do is allow it to carry us to its end.

for all the comforting philosophies we can offer, the most powerful thing we can give each other in the face of death is companionship and witness. When I’m struggling with the fear of my own death, or with grief over the death of someone I love, what comforts me most isn’t philosophies or ideas. It’s the presence of someone who loves me just sitting with me silently, letting me feel what I have to feel, not trying to fix it or make it go away but simply being with me while I feel it. It’s the presence of someone who loves me letting me know that I’m not alone — and by their presence, being part of the foundation I can come back to when the feelings pass.

There were a few reasons I pushed you away all those years ago. Grief. The stress of running a struggling company. My fear that we would never survive long distance and all the other obstacles standing in our way. But the biggest mistake I made was believing you were better off without me because I wasn't good enough. I let my low self-esteem and insecurities stand in the way of what I wanted with you, and I'll be damned if I let you make that same mistake. In fact, I forbid it, because I refuse to spend another ten years waiting for you to come to your senses. I will always fight for what's in our best interest, even if it means fighting you in the process.

Each brought me joy, each taught me something about the nature of love, and each left me struggling through the journey of grief. For all the sorrow that these losses brought, however, I’ve never regretted sharing my life with any one of these souls. As that wise woman promised so many years ago, love proved worth its cost every time.

When I’m struggling with the fear of my own death, or with grief over the death of someone I love, what comforts me most isn’t philosophies or ideas. It’s the presence of someone who loves me just sitting with me silently, letting me feel what I have to feel, not trying to fix it or make it go away but simply being with me while I feel

How much more straightforward it was to bear a physical illness or malady. You need not do anything but rest, and the body simply healed itself. Miseries of the mind, however, were quite another matter; they were a sticky spider's web, and Beatrice had learned that the more you struggled against them, the tighter the strands seemed to bind you.

You had now lived outside India longer than you lived in it. Your relationship with your motherland was complex, so much so that I think you struggled to talk about it. It must have been so bittersweet and even painful for you to visit, catching a glimpse of a parallel universe that held both your past and your alternate present in one view; a place that, like you, had changed so much that neither of you could fully recognize the other anymore; yet simultaneously a place that saw and loved you in a way that your other, permanent home never could. Your grief, like all grief, forced you to hold contradictory emotions at once: longing and repulsion, relief and agitation, freedom and entrapment.

But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me — when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.

with you, he would have wasted a life that had become useless to him and would have been unable to accustom himself to your grief. The frustration would have filled him with hatred. Now he will become great and strong by struggling against adversities that he will change into good fortune. Let him rebuild the future for both of you, Madame. I can promise that he is in good hands.

Your lingering presence erodes me. Heartbeat by heartbeat. Cell by aging cell. Washing away any sense of self I ever had. Intruding into a nothingness I've struggled to find the pieces to fill. A jar filled with stones, piled with pebbles, topped with sand, only to be left with the knowledge that water, with enough time and persistence, has the power to wash it all away. Your name is on my lips. Frozen. A familiar cadence of syllables that once soothed me. A name I can't speak. Can't think of. Not on this shore, at our lake. Not on this day. When only a year ago, with a foreshadowing that is now ice in my veins, you stood next to me, in this jacket, your hand in mine, so warm, and stared out at this expanse and whispered in awe, "This is what a cold lake looks like.

I was quite frightened about the effect of Wilson’s leaving him. We managed to prepare him as well as we could, and when he found she was actually gone, the passion of grief I had feared was just escaped. He struggled with himself, the eyes full of tears, and the lips quivering, but there was not any screaming and crying such as made me cry last year on a like occasion. He had made up his mind.

Maybe that’s what coming to terms with grief was. It wasn’t that one day you suddenly got over it and felt better, back to the way you’d felt before. It was that you learned to live around it, that you struggled on living through it, that you grew yourself beyond it, until one day your life and your love were bigger than your pain and emptiness. You never got back to normal, but you could, if you were brave, get to somewhere good.

He talked of watching as those three youngsters emerged from childhood into adulthood, adopting the distinct personalities that became their own, and about the pride and the unavoidable sorrow he and Anna had felt over those changes. He spoke of his children’s triumphs and their heartbreaks, the commencements and marriages, and the peculiar grief that parents endure when they must watch their children struggle and suffer and are powerless to intervene.

And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.

Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and actions--the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself. I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections. We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both. We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first; then with each other. We will set and respect boundaries; we will honor hard work, hope, and perseverance. Rest and play will be family values, as well as family practices. You will learn accountability and respect by watching me make mistakes and make amends, and by watching how I ask for what I need and talk about how I feel. I want you to know joy, so together we will practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy, so together we will learn how to be vulnerable. When uncertainty and scarcity visit, you will be able to draw from the spirit that is a part of our everyday life. Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other. No matter what, you will always belong here. As you begin your Wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you.

Grief is a strange thing. Some moments it’s a weight on her chest, a pressure behind her eyes and glass in her throat. Then, when the tears slow and her breath no longer feels like it’s being torn from her lungs, everything starts to feel less. Numb. It’s the difference between fighting against the current and letting the river sweep her away. Struggle and surrender. Anna thinks it feels a little bit like drowning. Limbs weightless and cold. Suspended in time while the world continues to turn.

Grief manifests itself in many different ways. Some people wear grief like a cloak, hanging heavy over their shoulders, hiding them from the outer gaze of those unaffected. Some people carry it around with them like an anchor, weighing them down as they struggle to swim against the tides of everyday life. Some remain silent and stoic and that is a danger in itself. To stay quiet and not give grief room to breathe, is like trying to extinguish a fire with a teacup of water. The emotion burns at you until it’s all encompassing and you are destroyed from the inside out.

Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.

At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But there were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived underwater and had given up on the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what happened?

He possesses a noble heart, madame," replied the count, "and he has acted rightly. He feels that every man owes a tribute to his country; some contribute their talents, others their industry; these devote their blood, those their nightly labors, to the same cause. Had he remained with you, his life must have become a hateful burden, nor would he have participated in your griefs. He will increase in strength and honor by struggling with adversity, which he will convert into prosperity. Leave him to build up the future for you, and I venture to say you will confide it to safe hands.

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.

On the day of the funeral, the president, the First Lady, and Robert Lincoln asked for time alone with Willie. “They desired that there should be no spectator of their last sad moments in that house with their dead child & brother,” Benjamin Brown French told his diary. In the half hour the small family spent in the Green Room, “there came one of the heaviest storms of rain & wind that has visited this city for years, and the terrible storm without seemed almost in unison with the storm of grief within, for Mrs. Lincoln, I was told, was terribly affected at her loss and almost refused to be comforted.

The history of one man is the history of all, a dragging trial, more or less prolonged, more or less bitter—sorrowful. The note of human nature is nothing but one sustained cry. But what are the sufferings of others compared to those from which I am now suffering? Does the open wound in another’s breast soften the anguish of the gaping ulcer in our own? Does the blood which is welling from another man’s side stanch that which is pouring from our own? Does the general grief of our fellow-creatures lessen our own private and particular woe? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears.

Enraged I throw myself to the ground and I scream, my best friend is gone, this world is so mean. I cry as I pound my fists on his grass, I’m very upset that our time went so fast. My heart beats faster than ever before, my tears unstoppable, I'm hurt to the core. There are no words people can say, that will ease my excruciating pain. I don’t understand why you had to go. You leaving me, we just didn’t know. I’ll make it somehow, I’ll start anew. But, there is no way I can replace you. I struggle to make it through each day, and retain my sanity in this foggy haze. The sadness and pain that I display, is because God decided to take you away.

Whatever may have blocked your understanding of what we have tried to tell you of our suffering,” he wrote, “is dissolved by suffering, and we beg you to allow us to share your grief. As we know that in these trying days to come, you share our struggle, for our struggle is the same.” Baldwin wanted Kennedy to see what was at the root of all of our troubles: that, for the most part, human beings refused to live honestly with themselves and were all too willing to hide behind the idols of race and ready to kill in order to defend them. His insight remains relevant today because the moral reckoning we face bears the markings of the original sin of the nation. But

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.

Because,' he said, 'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you, especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situation in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and the nI've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.' 'That I never would, sir; you know -,' impossible to proceed. [...] The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway and asserting a right to predominate - to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, and to speak. 'I grieve to leave Thornfield; I love Thornfield; I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright, and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in, with an origin, a vigorous, and expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you forever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.' 'Where do you see the necessity?' he asked, suddenly. 'Where? You, sir, have placed it before me.' 'In what shape?' 'In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman, your bride.' 'My bride! What bride? I have no bride!' 'But you will have.' 'Yes; I will! I will!' He set his teeth. 'Then I must go; you have said it yourself.' 'No; you must stay! I swear it, and the oath shall be kept.' 'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion. 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automation? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses your spirits; just as if both had passed through the grace, and we stood at God's feel, equal - as we are!' 'As we are!' repeated Mr. Rochester - 'so,' he added, including me in his arms, gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips; 'so, Jane!' 'Yes, so, sir,' I rejoined; 'and yet not so; for you are a married man, or as good as a married man, and we'd to one inferior to you - to one with whom you have no sympathy - whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union; therefore I am better than you - let me go!' 'Where, Jane? to Ireland?' 'Yes - to Ireland. I have spoke my mind, and can go anywhere now.' 'Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild, frantic bird that is tending its own plumage in its desperation.' 'I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.' Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him. 'And your will shall decide your destiny,' he said; 'I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions.' 'You play a farce, which I merely taught at.' 'I ask you to pass through life at my side - to be my second self, and best earthly companion.' [...] 'Do you doubt me, Jane?' 'Entirely.' 'You have no faith in me?' 'Not a whit.

One of the meanings of “saddha,” the word for faith in Pali, is hospitality. Faith is about opening up and making room for even the most painful experiences, the ones where we “take apart the chord” of our suffering to find notes of horror, desolation, and piercing fear. If I could be willing to make room for my aching numbness, and the river of grief it covered, allowing it, even trusting it, I would be acting in faith. Perhaps this is how suffering leads to faith. In times of great struggle, when there is nothing else to rely on and nowhere else to go, maybe it is the return to the moment that is the act of faith. From that point, openness to possibility can arise, willingness to see what will happen, patience, endeavor, strength, and courage. Moment by moment, we can find our way through.

You are allowed to have struggles. You are allowed to feel broken and too shattered to pick up the pieces. You are allowed to sit in the darkness for a while and not immediately barrel toward the light. You are allowed to not yet be able to see the light. None of this makes you a burden. Life is really hard sometimes. Everyone will struggle at one point or another. We all take turns helping to carry one another's burdens—this is how we survive. It's OK to share your sadness, even if you're sad all the time. Even if your sadness makes others sad. Even if you're difficult to be around. Let others help you. You do not have to hold it alone. You do not have to be your best self to be worthy of care. You do not have to apologize for being a human who takes up space. You are hurting and imperfect and deserving of love.

So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children on the great breast of Nature, she that perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.

I didn’t kiss you just then because I fucking care about you. I’ve cared about you for a long time. When I kiss you for the first time, it’s not going to be overpowered with grief and trepidation. And you aren’t going to jump when I touch you.” I bring my hand up, grazing it along her cheek. She trembles and I don’t know how to take that. “You can be pissed at me all you want—I’m used to it—as long as you understand that I wanted to kiss you. That it’s a struggle, even right now, to keep myself from tasting you. Shit, Annie. It’s always been a struggle with you. But I want your lips healed. Your heart whole. And I want you to be sure I’m who you want. Because I’m not playing around here. I’m all in. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, and I’m at the point that I don’t really give a shit anymore. But I’m putting it out there so at least you understand how I feel.” I push

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind. I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored. I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now. And yet. And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone. And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.

Since the 1960s, many men have struggled to find a new definition of masculinity, one that does not involve shutting down emotionally only to burst out in anger or violence once those feelings surface. In the 1980s, Robert Bly, a leader of the men’s movement, wisely and sadly noted that men don’t talk about their feelings because when they look inside, they cannot find them. And the common experience of the absent father is also a reflection of that distant God whom we can’t access—He came, He procreated, He went to the office, so obey the rules while He’s gone and He’ll be back on Judgment Day to punish you if you were naughty. Expressing most feelings other than anger is taboo for men, and many of us women also have this problem of repressed emotion, especially when we enter the once-forbidden work realms of men, where strong emotion is considered a weakness. Bly’s other great and wise suggestion was that the appropriate response to such an absence of feelings is grief.

Great artistic works are often based on solving several psychological problems simultaneously. In literature this is often accomplished by splitting apart the conflict and assigning each aspect to a different character. Marjie Rynearson, for instance, wrote an award-winning play, Jenny, about the meeting and reconciliation of two women: the mother of a murder victim and the mother of the murderer. Within the dialogue between the two characters she sought to resolve two sets of problems: the rage and grief of the victim's mother, and the horror, guilt, and grief of the murderer's mother. She worked on the play for several years, and only when it was finished did she realize that through it she was struggling to resolve her feelings about the suicide of her best friend. Rynearson had simultaneously been, in effect, both the friend of the victim and the friend of the perpetrator of the killing. The power of the work lay in its simultaneous resolution of conflicting problems.

The Broken Beauty I see compassion in your eyes, And I wonder, What agony has taught you such tenderness? I see kindness in your soul, And I wonder, What grief has taught you such gentleness? I see light in your eyes, And I wonder, What suffering has broken into light? I see wholeness rising in your heart, And I wonder, What brokenness has taught you such healing in life? I see smiles blooming in your face, And I wonder, What bruise has brought you such beauty? I smell fragrance of your soul. And I wonder, What murk has taught you to unfold? I see kindness in your face, And I wonder, What severity has taught you such softness? I see gratitude lighting your cheeks, And I wonder, What loss has taught you such humbleness? I sense peace in your soul, And I wonder, What struggles have taught you to surrender? I see shimmer in your eyes, And I wonder, What darkness has brought you to such light? I sense peace in your heart, And I wonder, What defeat has taught you such a submission? I see humility in your face, And I wonder, What trials have taught you such a gratitude? I sense freedom in your breath, And I wonder, What restraint has brought such a release? I see soaring of your wings, And I wonder, What confinement has taught you to fly in sky? I see the ocean in your eyes, And I wonder, What grief has brought such an oceanic vastness? I hear the splashing in your laughter, And I wonder, What sorrow has brought this dancing madness? I hear the brook babbling in your heart, And I wonder, What moss was gathered on the way that taught you to flow again? I sense the delight in your soul, And I wonder, What sadness came with such wisdom, to release the running river again? I see stars in your eyes, And I wonder, What darkness has given rise to the galaxy in you? I see the sun rising in your soul, And I wonder, What night has brought such a glory in rise? .....Jayita Bhattacharjee Copyright 2019 Jayita Bhattacharjee

For me, grief is like waking up every day in a different house. I feel as though I ought to know my way around by now. I have been grieving for my father for more than 2 years but find that I am continually losing my bearings, struggling to learn the layout anew. I will walk through a door in my mind that I didn't even notice the day before, trip over a memory I've relived a thousand times, and it's as if I were seeing the space around me, breathing in this hushed loneliness, for the first time. I try to talk to my husband and children about my mother but soon stop. It's too much of an effort. It feels forced. I have to explain so much before they can understand, and even then, there's no way for them to join me in the past. It's the same when I bring up my father or my grandmother. The three people who saw me through my childhood, who remember best what I was like as a baby and a little girl, are gone, and now I carry these stories and memories alone. Three deaths. One composite lump of grief.

EAGLE The East direction is represented by eagle and condor, who bring vision, clarity, and foresight. Eagle perceives the entire panorama of life without becoming bogged down in its details. The energies of eagle assist us in finding the guiding vision of our lives. The eyes of condor see into the past and the future, helping to know where we come from, and who we are becoming. When I work with a client who is stuck in the traumas of the past, I help her to connect with the spirit of eagle or condor. As this energy infuses the healing space, my client is often able to attain new clarity and insight into her life. This is not an intellectual insight, but rather a call, faint at first, hardly consciously heard. Her possibilities beckon to her and propel her out of her grief and into her destiny. I believe that while everyone has a future, only certain people have a destiny. Having a destiny means living to your fullest human potential. You don’t need to become a famous politician or poet, but your destiny has to be endowed with meaning and purpose. You could be a street sweeper and be living a destiny. You could be the president of a large corporation and be living a life bereft of meaning. One can make oneself available to destiny, but it requires a great deal of courage to do so. Otherwise our destiny bypasses us, leaving us deprived of a fulfillment known by those who choose to take the road less traveled. Eagle allows us to rise above the mundane battles that occupy our lives and consume our energy and attention. Eagle gives us wings to soar above trivial day-to-day struggles into the high peaks close to Heaven. Eagle and condor represent the self-transcending principle in nature. Biologists have identified the self-transcending principle as one of the prime agendas of evolution. Living molecules seek to transcend their selfhood to become cells, then simple organisms, which then form tissues, then organs, and then evolve into complex beings such as humans and whales. Every transcending jump is inclusive of all of the levels beneath it. Cells are inclusive of molecules, yet transcend them; organs are inclusive of cells, yet go far beyond them; whales are inclusive of organs yet cannot be described by them, as the whole transcends the sum of its parts. The transcending principle represented by eagle states that problems at a certain level are best solved by going up one step. The problems of cells are best resolved by organs, while the needs of organs are best addressed by an organism such as a butterfly or a human. The same principle operates in our lives. Think of nested Russian dolls. Material needs are the tiny doll in the center. The larger emotional doll encompasses them, and both are contained within the outermost spiritual doll. In this way, we cannot satisfy emotional needs with material things, but we can satisfy them spiritually. When we go one step up, our emotional needs are addressed in the solution. We rise above our life dilemmas on the wings of eagle and see our lives in perspective.

Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live hidden from the gaze of others, and in that posture we confirm our exile. I hear these outcast brothers and sisters every day in my practice. Their numbers are many, and their grief encompasses every aspect of human life. For some, these outcast pieces are connected to their sexuality and bodies; for others, it is their anger or sadness—or their joy and exuberance—that has been banished. For many, it is their needs that were ignored. These outcast portions of soul do not quietly languish at the edges of our awareness; they appear as addictions, depression, or anxiety, calling for our attention. They appear in our dreams as waifs and orphans, in images of ghettos and prison cells. One man, struggling with alcoholism, had a dream that he was walking into a bar, oblivious to a beautiful woman standing there. As he entered, she shouted, “Hey, when are you going to pay attention to me?” Here was his soul calling to him, demanding that he turn and attend to his neglected life.

After a chronic illness is diagnosed, everyone comes around the sick person. But years later it is easy to forget or say surely it is not that bad; it must be in his head. But over time he will watch his life eroded by the disease as it eats away at his body and his capacities. He will struggle with depression. His grief will be relentless. He will grieve his inability to do what his heart longs to do. He may eventually go from a full-orbed life to a bed. If he takes medication, he will suffer from side effects that will debilitate him in additional ways. His sleep will suffer, he will endure pain, and the daily care of his body will absorb more and more of his energy. This could last for decades. What will such a man need from you? How will you handle all of his emotions? Can you allow him to grieve, weep, and ask questions? Can you endure with him what he has no choice to endure? You will get tired of his illness and his limitations—so will he. You can leave; he cannot. Many will leave or forget. Grief does not come in neat packages.

Let me make sure I understand.” Max pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re saying that a mad Fey king is responsible for the monsters on our doorstep?” Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. My mind struggled to grant it even the slightest chance of truth. “He has plenty of reason to hate you,” Ishqa said, quietly, “Long ago, the humans slaughtered many of our people to save themselves from each other. Your lives are so short compared to ours. Those days are nothing but a distant shadow in your ancestors’ lost memories. But us? We lived it, and that grief and anger still smolders within us. All it needs is a single spark.” His lip twitched, a hint of a sneer. “And someone among you has dared to provoke that.” My brows lurched of their own accord. “Provoked how?” “Fey have gone missing. Not many of them, but the king is certain it is the work of the humans.” “The work of which humans?” Max said. “There are millions of us, in hundreds of totally unrelated countries.” “The humans did not care which of our people, our Houses, they had to slaughter to get what they wanted,” Ishqa said, sharply. “Forgive us if many are not willing to extend a greater courtesy, not when our—

The silence regarding race, sexuality, and gender in spiritual literature may create the illusion that all is well in our spiritual communities, or that speaking of our unique embodiment in terms of race, sexuality, and gender is not necessary. When the subject is tabled for discussion in spiritual communities, the tension is palpable, and our inability to approach it honestly gives rise to frustration, grief, humiliation, grief, numbness, blindness, fear, and rage. We may even gather to commune in our rage, and perhaps to love one another fiercely and tenderly through it. This tensions is our most sacred time. To access this sacred time we must have common ground, we must stand at the water with all of our problems. Many of us consider being human to be our common ground. This perspective can negate unique differences and end up causing more tension. Being human is not enough common ground to navigate our challenges. If we could consider our common ground as trust we would be more able to remain open to the struggles. What are we trusting? We are trusting that what happens between us is the path by which we must come to awaken as human beings. We must stick to this path with great integrity no matter how difficult.

My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?' (Psalm 42:2) But the Psalmist also says, 'In death there is no one that is mindful of thee.' So it made me happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought to myself that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can. When my daughter was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, 'When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I'll take care of you,' and I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urge her to eat her custard. How good God was to me, to let me be there. I had prayed so constantly that I would be beside her when she died; for years I had offered up that prayer. And God granted it quite literally. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed.

Stood beneath the noose, already free this whole week now of that sorry and mortal body which was the sorry all which penance could rob him of, standing calm composed and at peace, the trivial noose already fitted to his neck and in his vision one last segment of the sky beyond which his theology had taught him he would presently be translated, and one single branch of an adjacent tree extending over the stockade as though in benison, one last gesture of earth’s absolution, with which he had long since severed any frail remaining thread; when suddenly a bird flew onto that bough and stopped and opened its tiny throat and sang—whereupon he who less than a second before had his very foot lifted to step from earth’s grief and anguish into eternal peace, cast away heaven, salvation, immortal soul and all, struggling to free his bound hands in order to snatch away the noose, crying, ‘Innocent! Innocent! I didn’t do it!’ even as the trap earth world and all, fell from under him—all because of one bird, one weightless and ephemeral creature which hawk might stoop at or snare or lime or random pellet of some idle boy destroy before the sun set—except that tomorrow, next year, there would be another bird, another spring, the same bough leafed again and another bird to sing on it, if he is only here to hear it, can only remain—Do you follow me?

I thought about the aftermath of the 1862 war, when thirty-eight hastily condemned warriors had been hung in Mankato, in the country's largest-ever mass execution. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves and then dug up for study by local doctors, including Dr. Mayo, who kept the body of Cut Nose for his personal examination. I thought about my father losing his teaching job, about his struggle with depression and drinking. About how angry he was that our history was not taught in schools. Instead, we had to battle sports mascots and stereotypes. Movie actors in brownface. Tourists with cameras. Welfare lines. Alcoholism. 'After stealing everything,' he would rage, 'now they want to blame us for it, too.' Social services broke up Native families, sending children like me to white foster parents. Every week, the newspapers ran stories about Indians who rolled their cars while drunk or the rise of crack cocaine on the reservations or somebody's arrest for gang-related crimes. No wonder so many Native kids were committing suicide. But there was so much more to the story of the run. What people didn't see because they chose never to look. Unlike the stone monument in New Ulm, built to memorialize the settlers' loss with angry pride, the Dakhota had created a living, breathing memorial that found healing in prayer and ceremony. What the two monuments shared, however, was remembering. We were all trying to find a way through grief.

The period stretching between the middle of the third and the middle of the seventeenth century is certainly the worst humanity has ever known : blood-lust, ignominy, lies. I don't consider that what has been should necessarily exist for the simple reason that it has been. Providence has endowed man with intelligence precisely to enable him to act with discernment. My discernment tells me that an end must be put to the reign of lies. It likewise tells me that the moment is not opportune. To avoid making myself an accomplice to the lies, I've kept the shavelings out of the Party. I'm not afraid of the struggle. It will take place, if really we must go so far. And I shall make up my mind to it as soon as I think it possible. It's against my own inclinations that I devoted myself to politics. I don't see anything in politics, anyway, but a means to an end. Some people suppose it would deeply grieve me to give up the activity that occupies me at this moment. They are deeply mistaken, for the finest day of my life will be that on which I leave politics behind me, with its griefs and torments. When the war's over, and I have the sense of having accomplished my duties, I shall retire. Then I would like to devote five or ten years to clarifying my thought and setting it down on paper. Wars pass by. The only things that exist are the works of human genius. If somebody else had one day been found to accomplish the work to which I've devoted myself, I would never have entered on the path of politics. I'd have chosen the arts or philosophy. The care I feel for the existence of the German people compelled me to this activity. It's only when the conditions for living are assured that culture can blossom.

Godly grief readily confesses. After seeing your sin, and sorrowing over your sin, the worst thing you can do is to try stuffing your sin, hoping nobody ever finds out who you really are. Turns out, the best way to avoid being found out a fake is just not to be one—to be open with people about your struggles, while being equally as open in your praise of God for what He’s making of you, despite your many messes and problems. This is where the church comes in so beautifully, because it gets us around people who can help us carry the nagging issues of our hearts—people to whom we can confess our battles with sin and confess our need for a Savior—while we’re doing the same for them. When the only person that truly knows all about us is the person who uses our hairbrush, we are easy pickings for the Enemy, ripe for being outmaneuvered and outsmarted. That’s how we remain slaves to our repeated failures, by basically resisting the redeeming love of God and the needed, encouraging support of others. Because even if we’re as much as 99 percent known (or much less, as is more often the case) to our spouse, our friends, our family, and the people around us, we are still not fully known. We’re still hiding out. We’re still covering up. We don’t want them to know everything. But true sorrow over sin begs to be vented—both vertically to God and horizontally to others. So mark this down: You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you’re habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you’re a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest. Even Satan himself cannot succeed at clobbering you with condemnation when the stuff he’s accusing you of doing is the same stuff you’ve been honestly admitting before God and others and trusting the Lord for His help with. That’s some of the best action you can take against the sin in your life. That’s responsible repentance.

Some days the world feels too hard and heavy, too much violence, too much pain, too much, too much, too much, and no way to make any of it make sense. Some days the people we love the most are enduring deep horror and loss and fear and trauma and pain and there's not a damn thing we can do, not really - and we're left sitting with some crazy helplessness and anger and grief without anywhere that feels big enough to hold it all. Some days you don't know if you want to scream the rage or cry the grief or run to the ocean or collapse in a puddle on the floor or sink into a too-hot bath or go back to bed or lose your mind for a little while, because holding it together takes more than you've got. Some days you feel like you'd do just about anything to have someone show up at your door for no other reason but to deliver an endless hug because reactivated trauma is a bitch, even when it's not your own, and because we all need more hugs, even on the good days—and some days are as far as hell from good as you can imagine. Some days you buy yourself the pale pink roses because you need a reminder of beauty, and you make yourself cup after cup of tea and finally let yourself cry, hard. You take the invite to go out to dinner and laugh and forget for a while. You pay attention, with deep gratitude, to the spaces that feel safe enough to open fully into, and to the people that show up to fill those spaces. You do what you can even though it feels like way too little and not near enough and not anything really in the grand scheme of things, and you say a prayer of thanks for the people give without knowing even why they are giving and a blessing for the grace of connections that are strong enough for that. Whatever you're doing right now, send a wave of love out into the universe. The biggest and brightest one you've got. Send protection, and healing, and fire, and light, and love and love and love and love. I can't tell you where you're sending it, but I know there's enough hurt and hard in the world right now, that whatever direction it goes and wherever it lands, it will rest with someone who needs it.

A goods train was approaching. The platform shook, and it seemed to her as if she were again in the train. Suddenly remembering the man who had been run over the day she first met Vronsky, she realized what she had to do. Quickly and lightly descending the steps that led from the water-tank to the rails, she stopped close to the passing train. She looked at the bottom of the trucks, at the bolts and chains, and large iron wheels of the slowly-moving front truck, and tried to estimate the middle point between the front and back wheels, and the moment when that point would be opposite her. She wanted to fall half-way between the wheels of the front truck, which was drawing level with her, but the little red handbag which she began to take off her arm delayed her, and then she was too late. The middle had passed her. She was obliged to wait for the next truck. A feeling seized her like that she had experienced when preparing to enter the water in bathing, and she crossed herself. The familiar gesture of making the sign of the cross called up a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness, that obscured everything for her, broke, and life showed itself to her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the wheels of the approaching second truck, and at the very moment when the midway point between the wheels drew level, she threw away her red bag, and drawing her head down between her shoulders threw herself forward on her hands under the truck, and with a light movement as if preparing to rise again, immediately dropped on her knees. And at the same moment she was horror-struck at what she was doing. ‘Where am I? What am I doing? Why?’ She wished to rise, to throw herself back, but something huge and relentless struck her on her head and dragged her down. ‘God forgive me everything!’ she said, feeling the impossibility of struggling… A little peasant muttering something was working at the rails. The candle, by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up with a brighter light, lit up for her all that had before been dark, crackled, began to flicker, and went out for ever.

true—helping a hurting person is a bit scary. We want to do the right thing, not the wrong thing—say what will help, not what will hurt. To add to our confusion, our friend is “not quite herself.” She’s different. We want our friend fixed and back to normal. All you have to do is care. Harold Ivan Smith described the process so well: Grief sharers always look for an opportunity to actively care. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief, but you can wash the sink full of dishes, listen to him or her talk, take his or her kids to the park. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief but you can visit the cemetery with him or her. Grief sharing is not about fixing—it’s about showing up. Coming alongside. Being interruptible. “Hanging out” with the bereaving. In the words of World War II veterans, “present and reporting for duty.” The grief path is not a brief path. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.[1] What can you expect from a friend who is hurting? Actually, not very much. And the more her experience moves beyond a loss and closer to a crisis or trauma, the more this is true. Sometimes you’ll see a friend experiencing a case of the “crazies.” Her response seems irrational. She’s not herself. Her behavior is different from or even abnormal compared to the person not going through a major loss. Just remember, she’s reacting to an out-of-the-ordinary event. What she experienced is abnormal, so her response is actually quite normal. If what the person has experienced is traumatic she may even seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). And because your friend is this way, she is not to be avoided. Others are needed at this time in her life. These are responses you can expect. Your friend is no longer functioning as she once did—and probably won’t for a while. You Are Needed You are needed when a person experiences a sudden intrusion or disruption in her life. If you (or another friend) aren’t available, the only person she has to talk with for guidance, support, and direction is herself. And who wants support from someone struggling with a case of the “crazies”? But a problem may arise when your friend doesn’t realize that she needs you, at least at that particular time. Your sensitivity is needed at this point. Remember, when your friend is hurting and facing a loss, you are dealing with a loss as well, because the relationship you had with your friend has changed. It’s not the same.

You stand alone upon a height," he said, dreamily, "like one in a dreary land. Behind you all is darkness, before you all is darkness; there is but one small space of light. In that one space is a day. They come, one at a time, from the night of To-morrow, and vanish into the night of Yesterday. "I have thought of the days as men and women, for a woman's day is not at all like a man's. For you, I think, they first were children, with laughing eyes and little, dimpled hands. One at a time, they came out of the darkness, and disappeared into the darkness on the other side. Some brought you flowers or new toys and some brought you childish griefs, but none came empty-handed. Each day laid its gift at your feet and went on. "Some brought their gifts wrapped up, that you might have the surprise of opening them. Many a gift in a bright-hued covering turned out to be far from what you expected when you were opening it. Some of the happiest gifts were hidden in dull coverings you took off slowly, dreading to see the contents. Some days brought many gifts, others only one. "As the days grew older, some brought you laughter; some gave you light and love. Others came with music and pleasure--and some of them brought pain." "Yes," sighed Evelina, "some brought pain." "It is of that," went on the Piper, "that I wished to be speaking. It was one day, was it not, that brought you a long sorrow?" "Yes." "Not more than one? Was it only one day?" "Yes, only one day," "See," said The Piper, gently, "the day came with her gift. You would not let her lay it at your feet and pass on into the darkness of Yesterday. You held her by her grey garments and would not let her go. You kept searching her sad eyes to see whether she did not have further pain for you. Why keep her back from her appointed way? Why not let your days go by?" "The other days," murmured Evelina, "have all been sad." "Yes, and why? You were holding fast to one day--the one that brought you pain. So, with downcast eyes they passed you, and carried their appointed gifts on into Yesterday, where you can never find them again. Even now, the one day you have been holding is struggling to free herself from the chains you have put upon her. You have no right to keep a day." "Should I not keep the gifts?" she asked. His fancy pleased her. "The gifts, yes--even the gifts of tears, but never a day. You cannot hold a happy day, for it goes too quickly. This one sad day that marched so slowly by you is the one you chose to hold. Lady," he pleaded, "let her go!

The narcissistic mother will manipulate other family members to gang up against you by focusing on everything that’s wrong with you. This conveniently takes the focus away from the real perpetrator, which is of course her. It’s interesting to think about the manipulation that’s actually going on. So if you have been labelled as the black sheep and that has been your permanent role in the family, it actually allows all the other family members to start feeling better about themselves. They actually start to believe that they are healthier and more obedient to the narcissistic mother than you, and again this creates a division within the family. Another important point is that if a child is scapegoated from an early age, he or she may fully internalize all of their narcissistic mother’s criticism and shame. This means that the scapegoats develop this harsh inner critic that will continue that inner dialogue that constantly reminds them of how bad and flawed they are. I guess you could call that “inner scapegoating,” and it is extremely toxic to a young impressionable child whose identity is still being formed. So, the scapegoat may struggle with low self-esteem and often continues to feel deeply inadequate and unlovable. Adult scapegoat children also tend to suppress a huge amount of abandonment anxiety because they were emotionally or even physically abandoned by the narcissistic mother over and over again. Adult scapegoat children therefore become super sensitive to observing any potential signs of approval or disapproval. These are all important aspects of the profound impact that a toxic family dynamic may continue to have on adult relationships. Perhaps you may still have issues with authority. Maybe you’re still used to justifying yourself or somehow proving your worth. This is an unconscious pattern that you may still not be aware of and that you are perpetuating because you don’t realize how powerful these dysfunctional family dynamics still are. And once you wake up and understand you can let go of that label, you can break that pattern by choosing to think and behave completely different. You can learn to choose your battles and do not always have to be defensive. You do not always have to feel victimized. You need to become more self-aware and notice if you are still trying to get your parents’ approval or validation. Maturing into adulthood means that you may need to understand that you may never have a healthy relationship with an intentional perpetrator of abuse. You need to process your feelings of frustration, loneliness, rage, and grief.

• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation" • We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet, • Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves, • "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it • Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt" • Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion) • The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. • "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done. • In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes. • We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines. • Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories. • She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable • What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? • Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present • Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth. • The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at • How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to. • The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits) • But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone. • In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment) • The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.

redemptive ending, glossing over the darkness and struggle that precedes it.1 We’ve got a cultural narrative that says bad things happen in order to help you grow, and no matter how bleak it seems, the end result is always worth the struggle. You’ll get there, if only you believe. That happy ending is going to be glorious. Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story. There’s a gag order on telling the truth, in real life and in our fictional accounts. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed.

These are the things they don't tell you about motherhood. How after a lifetime of struggling to love yourself it will be an absolute miracle to love these babies so wholly and unconditionally, sure. But also how they will love themselves the same way, at least at first, and in that maybe you will find a level of healing that all the therapy and self-help in the world couldn't get you to because you will realize at some point you must have loved yourself the very same way. Or how seeing the way they are so comfortable in their own skin, the way they strut around so confident in the fact that they are the masterpiece we too believe them to be, will make all the wok we've done trying to suck it all in or hide it or simply avoid looking at it in the mirror seem kind of silly. Because of course it is. It's against everything we were born knowing.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

When something has been terribly important to us for a long time and it is taken from us, we cannot help but be constantly drawn to the lost object. And we suffer daily as we struggle with the gradually dawning realization that it is gone forever.

At the time of great loss, people who have a mature faith give evidence of an uncommon relationship with God. And they demonstrate an uncomon inner sense of strength and poise that grows out of their confidence that such a relationship with God can never be taken away from them. Though we continue to struggle, we do affirm reality.

These struggles to change the world: I've seen them end either in a miserable dictatorship bloated with simplistic ideology applied with no less primitive rhetoric, or in a profitable business for a handful of cynics who always pretend to be disinterested, decent people committed to the welfare of the country and its inhabitants. In either case, the dead, the orphans and widows, become pretexts for parades and ceremonies as sickening as they are hypocritical. The great lie built on grief.

I remember hearing the writer Andrew Solomon tell a story about a married couple he’d met at a conference. During the course of the day, he said, each spouse had confessed independently to him to taking antidepressants but didn’t want the other to know. It turned out that they were hiding the same medication in the same house. No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We’ll talk with almost anyone about our physical health (can anyone imagine spouses hiding their reflux medication from each other?), even our sex lives, but bring up anxiety or depression or an intractable sense of grief, and the expression on the face looking back at you will probably read, Get me out of this conversation, pronto.

Grief, I’d come to realize, was like dust. When you’re in the thick of a dust storm, you’re completely disoriented by the onslaught, struggling to see or breathe. But as the force recedes, and you slowly find your bearings and see a path forward, the dust begins to settle into the crevices. And it will never disappear completely— as the years pass, you’ll find it in unexpected places at unexpected moments. Grief is just love looking for a place to settle.

felt dizzied by a sudden sweeping understanding of our collective grief—kids ripped from their homes in Palestine, kids shot in the streets of Gaza and Houston and Rio, the greed, the oil, and guns—it was the same struggle everywhere.

We may be invited to wrestle when we are grappling with a loss, a struggle, or feeling stuck. Wrestling might be the choice we have to make when we face the death of a dream, buckle under the weight of a long-carried grief, or feel overlooked and left behind. Or we may have to hold on to God in the face of something we never saw coming—a crisis that became a constant burden and is now our daily life, an unexpected broken heart, or a wait that never seems to end.

Grief, I’d come to realize, was like dust. When you’re in the thick of a dust storm, you’re completely disoriented by the onslaught, struggling to see or breathe. But as the force recedes, and you slowly find your bearings and see a path forward, the dust begins to settle into the crevices. And it will never disappear completely—as the years pass, you’ll find it in unexpected places at unexpected moments.

He was . . .” the kid starts, “he was the only . . .” he tries again and fails before deciding to allow his grief through—though he bats away a few of his tears. “He was the only person who ever saw me,” the kid sniffs and falters, face crumbling as though he’s lost everything. My eyes burn as I stare down at the dirt and nod. “I can relate.” For me, Dom was a mentor, a friend, and the only human being who truly saw the struggle going on inside me. He pinpointed it early, talked it out with me when I wanted to, and sat it out with me when I didn’t. It was our secret.

Struggling with my grief?” Although I don’t like the idea of my grandfather’s passing, I’m not struggling with anything but uncomfortable heartburn today.

At any given moment, everyone walks around with a laundry machine of vocabulary. Words spin and cycle in heads after fresh loads of new people, new ideas, and new encounters. This laundry machine of vocabulary hints at what we’re interested in, learning of, struggling with, and thinking about. It changes every few months. If you stick with a person long enough, while they may not confess to you that their family is dying, you wonder why they always come back to words like, “polka-dots,” “temperature” or phrases like “getting old” or “good morning, doc!

The separation of families is now widely understood as a human rights crisis at the border, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the destruction of black families in the era of mass incarceration. One in four women in the United States has a loved one behind bars, and the figure is nearly one in two for black women. When men are locked up, the women who love them are sentenced too-to social isolation, depression, grief, shame, costly legal fees, far-away prison visits (often with children in tow) and the staggering challenges of helping children overcome the trauma of parental incarceration. When loved ones are released from their cages, it is often women who are faced with the daunting task of supporting them as they struggle and often fail in a system rigged against them.

3) Writing Prompt: Some traits I hold dear about myself today were born from adaptations to my deepest wounds and emotional conflicts. These traits, born from struggle, are not less valuable. They are a testament to our resilience and strength and deserve our acceptance and appreciation. Take a moment to delve into a trait that you have come to appreciate about yourself. Can you trace its origin to a time of deep pain or struggle? This journey of self-discovery is a powerful tool for personal growth.

Hysteria! And grief and bitterness. That's what goes on. Not satisfied that our fighters evacuated the city, the enemy went after their women and children whom they left behind in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, slaughtered them, and left their bodies stacked in grotesque piles in the muddy lanes, fly-covered, rotting in the sun. They went after our Palestine Research Center the repository of our culture and history in exile, whose treasures we had been collecting since the day we left Palestine, looted it then burned it to the ground. Fifteen thousand of our people, including boys under the age if twelve and men over the age of eighty, were picked up and put in a concentration camp called Ansar. Our community in Lebanon, half a million men, women, and children found itself suddenly severed from institutions (educational, medical, cultural, economic, and social) they had depended on for their everyday living, which the enemy destroyed. Our fighters, the mainspring of our national struggle, were shipped to thre deserts of Algeria, the outback of Sudan, and the scorching plain of Yemen. Our leadership sought refuge in Tunisia. And when the choked psyche of our nation gasped for air, some months later, we lunged atat each other in civil war, because we had failed our people and ourselves. Our promises had proved illusory.

Nowhere so well as in the Well-tempered Clavichord are we made to realise that art was Bach’s religion. He does not depict natural soul-states, like Beethoven in his sonatas, no striving and struggling towards a goal, but the reality of life felt by a spirit always conscious of being superior to life, a spirit in which the most contradictory emotions, wildest grief and exuberant cheerfulness, are simply phases of a fundamental superiority of soul. It is this that gives the same transfigured air to the sorrow laden E flat minor prelude of the First Part and the care-free, volatile prelude in G major in the Second Part. Whoever has once felt this wonderful tranquility has comprehended the mysterious spirit that has here expressed all it knew and felt of life in the secret language of tone, and will render Bach the thanks we render only to the great souls to whom it is given to reconcile men with life and bring them peace.

I believe suicide is one of the strongest tools yet that the enemy uses to destroy lives. Not just for the ones that end their lives, but for those left behind.

When it seems you may be lost at sea, drowning in despair in the sea of emotions, it's hard to see the light in the distance. But there is a lighthouse shining from shore to shore, beckoning to come where it's safe.

Then there was the matter of Harry’s dismal academic performance. No match for his brother scholastically, Harry struggled with all his courses, failing two out of three. His D in geography was actually the lowest grade in his class. These failures, coupled with still-unaddressed feelings of grief and a newfound sense of shame, led Harry to believe he simply “didn’t measure up. I didn’t like school at all,” admitted Harry, who began to embrace the role in which Fleet Street had cast him. “I wanted to be the bad boy.” The

How life moves on and yet you feel like you’re standing still. How everyone else’s life goes back to normal while some moments I struggle to simply breathe from the grief that consumes me without warning.

I lost myself to darkness, then. Floating in a warm pool of blackness that beckoned me down and down. Dimly, I heard Bjorn calling my name but I couldn’t move my body to swim back up to him. Wasn’t sure I wanted to. Going back meant pain and grief and loneliness. Why should I fight for that? “This is not your end, daughter,” a gentle voice answered. “You must battle on, for them.” “I don’t want to,” I answered, not sure whether it was a truth or a lie. “I don’t want to go back.” “You must,” a harsher voice, devoid of patience, snarled. “For yourself.” Hands pressed against my back, lifting me through the dark waters. I struggled, trying to escape back down, but I could not slip their grip. Higher they pushed me, pain burning through my body as I drew closer to the surface. “No,” I moaned as the burning intensified. “It hurts!

As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the creator of the five stages of grief, reminds us, “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.… Beautiful people do not just happen.”1

As a society, we remain ill-prepared to understand and empathize with the grieving process, struggling to find the right words and provide meaningful support.

No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We'll talk with almost anyone about our physical health (can anyone imagine spouses hiding their reflux medication from each other?), even our sex lives, but bring up anxiety or depression or an intractable sense of grief, and the expression on the face looking back at you will probably read, 'Get me out of this conversation, pronto.' But what are we so afraid of? It's not as if we're going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There's beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

At first, this book was my grief journal, but over two years, it became a tribute to Black sisterhood, the struggles and strides of Black people, and the strength it takes to wake up each day in a country that doesn’t love you.

The other day, Andrew Glynn, a fellow adopted person, wrote to me and asked when I came up with the term Camp Suck It Up. I had no idea, but his question got me thinking about camps in terms of the stages of grief. I began listing The Stages of An Adopted Person’s Life: 1. Camp Suck it Up, 2. Camp What the Fuck, 3. Camp Fuck It, and then, when it came to the final camp, the camp of I’ve got this, I’m okay now, I could not think of the right name! What exactly is it I was looking to feel? First, I named it Camp Freedom, but it started sounding like a tampon commercial, so I called Andrew back and asked him for his idea. He, too, struggled! We listed off things we thought we wanted, Camp Me, Camp Enough, Camp Peace, but none felt quite right. Finally he said, I just want to feel good and to have a stomach that doesn’t hurt. I made 4. Camp Feel Good, but I’m still thinking about that final camp, and what it is I’m working so hard to feel or be.

He's struggling with his grief.

When I’m struggling with the fear of my own death, or with grief over the death of someone I love, what comforts me most isn’t philosophies or ideas. It’s the presence of someone who loves me just sitting with me silently, letting me feel what I have to feel, not trying to fix it or make it go away but simply being with me while I feel it. It’s the presence of someone who loves me letting me know that I’m not alone — and by their presence, being part of the foundation I can come back to when the feelings pass.

Passion and annoyance were fire, and fire was alive and crackling with power. Fire breathed. Grief was a vat of quicksand; the more one struggled against it, the deeper it pulled one under. I'd much rather be set ablaze than buried alive.

The Dawn of Understanding In the quiet of dawn, a young boy named Eli stands alone, his silhouette barely visible against the awakening sky. The world around him is waking up, but inside, Eli feels as if everything has come to a standstill. The questions that plague his mind are like a relentless storm, with no sign of clearing. Eli’s mother had been his rock, his guiding star, but her silent battle with her own demons was one she couldn’t win. Her departure from this world left a gaping wound in Eli’s heart, one that seemed impossible to heal. “Why?” he whispers to the open sky, the only witness to his solitary grief. Jacob, a passerby, finds Eli by chance—or perhaps by fate. He sees the young boy’s pain, a mirror to his own past struggles. Jacob had once stood at the precipice of despair, never considering the ripple effects his absence would cause. But now, looking into Eli’s eyes, he sees a reflection of what could have been—of what he almost left behind. Together, they sit beneath the vast expanse of the sky, two souls connected by shared sorrow. Jacob doesn’t have all the answers, but he offers what he can—a listening ear and a promise that the pain won’t last forever. “Her love is a bond that won’t sever,” he assures Eli, “She’s watching over you, now and forever.” As the sun rises, bringing warmth to the chill of the morning, Eli feels a glimmer of hope. The “why” that echoed in his heart begins to fade, replaced by a newfound resolve. They are here for a reason, not just to survive the storms, but to cherish each moment of calm they’re given. Eli and Jacob part ways, but the lesson remains. They are more than their sorrows, more than their fears—they are the sum of love that endures through the years. And as Eli walks back home, the first rays of sunlight touching his face, he carries with him the dawn of understanding.

For some of us, the complexity and richness of being fully alive is difficult and we struggle to consent to all it holds: loss, grief, pain, aloneness, illness, the pangs of hunger or fullness, the grip of fear, and the finality of death.

Think outside yourself. Every person has a unique childhood, a unique set of traumas, unique mental health issues. There are many people not lucky enough to be born as intellectually or emotionally intelligent as you were, not lucky enough to have an upbringing like yours. You have no idea what kind of grief, heartbreak, or other misfortune another person may be suffering through. However awful someone is acting, it would probably make a lot more sense if you could spend a few minutes inside their brain. I’ve been using a little mantra. When I’m down on the low rungs and I have a moment of self-awareness where I realize I’m on the low rungs, I say in my head: Climb. It’s not a scolding moment, it’s a moment of self-compassion. I’m doing that thing that every human does sometimes. It’s okay. I caught myself. Climb. Once you’ve begun to address your internal tug-of-war, turn your attention outwards. What do your surroundings look like through the Ladder lens? Think about the people you love. Where are they great at being high-rungers? Where do they struggle down on the low rungs? When someone is acting like a monster, they’re not a monster, they’re a human mired in an internal tug-of-war and losing. We all have topics that bring out our most biased, irrational selves. We all have areas of embarrassing ignorance. You might be a better high-runger than they are about a particular thing—but they are almost certainly better at it than you in some other area.

I don’t know or care much about martyrs,” she said. “All that smacks of a higher plan, a cosmology—something I don’t believe in. If we can’t comprehend the plan at hand, how could a higher plan make any more sense? But were I to believe in martyrdom, I suppose I’d say you can only be a martyr if you know what you are dying for, and choose it.” “Ah, so then there are innocent victims in this trade. Those who don’t choose to die but are in the line of fire.” “There are . . . there will be . . . accidents, I guess.” “Can there be grief, regret, in your exalted circle? Is there any such thing as a mistake? Is there a concept of tragedy?” “Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction. Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin, if anything is—” “Ah—now I’ve heard the word I never expected to hear you say.” “Denial? Sin?” “No. We.” “I don’t know why—” “The lone dissenter at Crage Hall turns institutional? A company gal? A team player? Our former Miss Queen of Solitaire?” “You misunderstand. There is a campaign but no agents, there is a game but no players. I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism.” “Hah! You the most individual, the most separate, the most real . . .” “Like everyone else you refer to my looks. And you make fun of them.

I struggle to control my thoughts sometimes, and when they spiral out of control as they did...I can't always find air. My mind is this irrational, uncontrolled nightmare without an escape.

In the quiet moments, when the world feels overwhelming, we may find ourselves retreating into the shadows of our own sorrow. It is there that we often feel most alone, as if our pain is an island adrift in a sea of indifference. Yet, in acknowledging our shared humanity, we discover that our secret struggles can weave threads of solidarity, reminding us that we are never truly alone in our grief.

We all encounter moments when our inner world feels too vast and turbulent to share with others, leading us to withdraw into ourselves. What others may perceive as coldness can be a sanctuary where we seek refuge from our pain, a quiet acknowledgment of our struggles. By creating a culture of empathy and kindness, we invite others to step into the warmth of connection, transforming their secret sorrows into stories of hope and healing.

What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can’t penetrate. …people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality. What am I living on? Someone said the other day, “that old irrepressible-impossible- hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better? Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all…I can imagine now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent.

No. I guess I just want to understand why he did it. I want there to be a reason." "Too much pain, rage, grief. Too much reality." There are so many things that can break you if there's nothing to hold you together. "That's not an excuse," he says. "No, it's not an excuse," I reply. "You asked for a reason. It's a reason. Just not a good one." I can tell he's still struggling to understand, to make this fit into his view of the world; but it never will. And it shouldn't. It has no place in the world, no matter how often it happens.

When you encounter a struggle or a grief, embrace that as a time when you are being privileged to allow Jesus to pull you up to His chest and comfort you in a way you’ve never experienced before. Embrace the opportunity to know Jesus in a new way. And in this way, you can find the power to be thankful in any circumstance.

He smoothed a little hair off her forehead. “I’m proud of you.” “It was so awesome.” “See? I knew you’d find something here to sink your teeth into.” He reached down, crossed his arms under her bottom and lifted her straight up so that her face was even with his. “Nowwww, what did we decide?” she asked, but her tone was teasing. Her smile was playful. “We decided that I would not kiss you.” “That’s right.” “I haven’t,” he said. “Maybe we should have talked about this,” she added, but she certainly didn’t struggle. In fact, this seemed oddly right. Celebratory. Like being picked up and swung around after the win of a big game. And that was how she felt—as though she’d just scored a touchdown. Arms resting on his shoulders, she clasped her hands behind his head. “We further decided that if you kissed me, I would let you,” he said. “You’re fishing.” “Does this look like fishing to you?” “Begging?” “Doing exactly as I’ve been told. Waiting.” What the hell, she thought. Absolutely nothing could feel better after the night she’d just spent than to plant a big wet one on this guy—a guy who’d keep his business open all night just in case they needed something. So she laid one on him. She slid her lips over his, opening them, moving over his with wicked and delicious intent, getting her tongue involved. And he did nothing but hold her there, allowing this. “Did you not like that?” she asked. “Oh,” he said. “Am I allowed to respond?” She whacked him softly in the head, making him laugh. She tried it again, and this time it was much more interesting. It made her heart beat faster, made her breathe hard. Yes, she thought. It is okay to feel something that doesn’t hurt sometimes. This wasn’t because she was grief-stricken or needy, this was because she was victorious. And all she could think about at the moment was his delicious mouth. When their mouths came apart, she said, “I feel like a total champ.” “You are,” he said, enjoying her mood more than she would ever guess. “God, you taste good.” “You don’t taste that bad,” she said, laughing. “Put me down now,” she instructed. “No. Do it again.” “Okay, but only one more, then you have to behave.” She planted another one on him, thoroughly enjoying his lips and tongue, the strength of the arms that held her. She refused to worry about whether this was a mistake. She was here, she was happy for once, and his mouth felt as natural to hers as if she’d been kissing him for years. She let the kiss be a little longer and deeper than she thought prudent, and even that made her smile. When it was over, he put her on her feet. “Whew,” she said. “We don’t have nearly enough births in this town.” “We have another one in about six weeks. And if you’re very, very good…” Ah, he thought. That gives me six weeks. He touched the end of her nose. “Nothing wrong with a little kissing, Mel.” “And you won’t get ideas?” He bellowed. “You can make me behave, it turns out. But you can’t keep me from getting ideas.” *

We all have gifts and talents. When we cultivate those gifts and share them with the world, we create a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it’s not merely benign or “too bad” if we don’t use the gifts that we’ve been given; we pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don’t use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle. We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief. Most of us who are searching for spiritual connection spend too much time looking up at the sky and wondering why God lives so far away. God lives within us, not above us. Sharing our gifts and talents with the world is the most powerful source of connection with God. Using our gifts and talents to create meaningful work takes a tremendous amount of commitment, because in many cases the meaningful work is not what pays the bills. Some folks have managed to align everything—they use their gifts and talents to do work that feeds their souls and their families; however, most people piece it together. No one can define what’s meaningful for us. Culture doesn’t get to dictate if it’s working outside the home, raising children, lawyering, teaching, or painting. Like our gifts and talents, meaning is unique to each one of us. Self-Doubt

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad’s muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one’s skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you’d struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don’t want to forget, but you don’t want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist.

I did not know I would struggle Through a ragged underbrush Without an upward path Because there is no path There is only a blunt rock With a river to fall into

Technological advancement and wealth are conflated in capitalism with human progress. All aspects of human existence that cannot be measured or quantified—beauty, truth, love, grief, the search for meaning, and the struggle with our own mortality—are ignored and ridiculed.

I believe that when a loved one has dementia, you experience many layers of grief. The first wave of grief comes with the diagnosis. The realisation that the person who has supported you all your life, will no longer be able to do so, no matter how hard they try. Grief the first time they struggle to remember your name or your relationship to each other. Grief when you have to accept that you can no longer keep them at home. Grief as they lose the ability to communicate, as another piece of the jigsaw is lost. Grief every time they are afraid, agitated or confused. So much grief you don't think you can cope with anymore. And then the overwhelming tidal wave of grief when they pass, when you would give anything to go back to the first wave of grief.

Every day, I lost a little bit more of him, and I was afraid that he would slip away until nothing remained but an old photo and a faint longing, a half smile as I struggled to remember some thing he once taught me on a midnight long ago. I had to find a way to hold on to him. I had to find a way to hold on to myself.

I lifted my futile hand and slammed it hard against the rail. I did it again, and again, scarcely feeling the sting of the blows, in a frenzy of furious rage and grief. “Stop that!” a voice spoke behind me, and a hand seized my wrist, preventing me from slapping the rail yet again. “Let go!” I struggled, but his grip was too strong. “Stop,” he said again, firmly. His other arm came around my waist, and he pulled me back, away from the rail. “You mustn’t do that,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself.” “I don’t bloody care!” I wrenched against his grasp, but then slumped, defeated. What did it matter? He let go of me then, and I turned to find myself facing a man I had never seen before. He wasn’t a sailor; while his clothes were crumpled and stale with long wear, they had originally been very fine; the dove-gray coat and waistcoat had been tailored to flatter his slender frame, and the wilted lace at his throat had come from Brussels. “Who the hell are you?” I said in astonishment. I brushed at my wet cheeks, sniffed, and made an instinctive effort to smooth down my hair. I hoped the shadows hid my face. He smiled slightly, and handed me a handkerchief, crumpled, but clean. “My name is Grey,” he said, with a small, courtly bow.

Why do we call yoga a practice? The yoga poses of life—the grief, the fear, the uncertainty—rarely offer us the option of coming to child pose or modifying the posture. The yoga mat offers us a safe and controlled environment in which we can witness our challenges, embrace our discomfort, and hold space for our struggles. A yoga practice doesn’t prevent the storms of life, but it does teach us to weather those storms more gracefully.

Hunter tossed another piece of wood onto the fire, sending up a spray of live coals, a few of which fell in Tom’s lap. Tom scrambled backward and tried to shake them off, no easy feat with his hands tied behind him. In the process he lost his balance and toppled sideways. Hunter squatted by the fire and draped his arms over his knees, his gaze fixed on the feeble flames while Tom struggled to sit back up. The Comanche’s eyes shone with that peculiar light Loretta was coming to recognize as laughter. After a long while he said, “When the sun rises, we will leave. You will be set free, old man.” Tom didn’t look as if he believed that. His eyes still glowing with that somber amusement she hated so much, Hunter glanced at her. “I make no grief behind me.” The muscles along Tom’s throat stood out as he struggled to speak. When he finally did, the words came out in a squeak. “And what about her?” “She goes with me.” “I’ll b-buy her from ya. R-rifles, I can get rifles. And cartridges.” There was no mistaking the interest that bit of information sparked in the Comanche. Loretta’s heart soared with sudden hope. “You have rifles?” “I--um, no. B-but I can git ’em.” Hunter studied Tom at length, then slid his gaze to Loretta. “Please,” Tom whispered. “There’s other gals you can steal. Don’t take this one. Let her go home to her family.” Breaking off, he licked his lips. “She ain’t done you no harm.” After a long while, Hunter returned his attention to the fire. “This Comanche does not sell his women. Not even for rifles. She goes with me.” “Why this girl?” Hunter tossed a sliver of wood onto the flames. “Another will not do.

There are those who can take up their grief and bear it, strong natures who feel their own powers through the very heaviness of their burden. Weaker people give themselves up to their sorrow passively, as they would submit to a sickness; and like a sickness their sorrow pervades them, drinks itself into their innermost being and becomes a part of them, is assimilated in them through a slow struggle, and finally loses itself in them, as they return to perfect health. But there are yet others to whom sorrow is a violence done them, a cruelty which they never learn to accept as a trial or chastisement or as simple fate. It is to them an act of tyranny, an expression of personal hate, and it always leaves a sting in their hearts. Children do not often grieve in this way, but Niels Lyhne did. For had he not been face to face with God in the fervor of his prayers? Had he not crawled on his knees to the foot of the throne, full of hope, tremulous with fear, and yet firm in his faith in the omnipotence of prayer, with courage to plead until he should be heard? And he had been forced to rise from the dust and go away with his hope put to shame. His faith had not been able to bring the miracle down from heaven, no God had answered his cry, death had marched straight on and seized its prey, as if no sheltering wall of prayers had been lifted toward the sky.

I believe you write the book you want to read. As a reader what I craved was some recognition, however refracted, of the tumult of lived experience, of the pain and absurdity of trying to reach other human beings with some modicum of honesty and openness. And so without quite realizing what I was doing, over the course of the next few years, I wrote a series of stories that eventually became my first book, each of which dramatized in one way or another this struggle: how to find intimacy in a culture that has hollowed out the very language we use to describe it. How to capture the experience of grief when our terms for it have been overrun by the commercialization of confession. The enemy wasn’t New Criticism. It was cliché. I was trying to write prose whose rhythm created an atmosphere, a music, that allowed the nuances of human isolation, the desire to overcome it, and what it felt like to fail or sometimes briefly succeed in defying that isolation rise into the consciousness of a reader. What I believed then, and still do, is that in a violent, distracted, media-saturated world the most needed artistic resource is no longer a critique of the possibility of meaning—mass culture itself has become that critique. What is needed, rather, is the production of meaning that resists distraction. Consumer capitalism thrives by simultaneously creating human loneliness and commodifying a thousand cures for it. One form of resistance to it is the experience in art and life of a human intimacy achieved through sustained attention to what lies beyond and outside the sphere of the market.

Reinvention is my philosophy, if you want to call it that,” he says, looking out the window. “Imagination is the key to creating a life that is ever new.” Stanley turns his eyes to me. “We are each of us a changeling person,” he says. “We are not going to be the same decade after decade. Wisdom results from confronting not only one’s desires and capacities but also one’s limitations.” “The Layers,” one of Stanley’s best-loved poems, is his crystallization of this wisdom. I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road is precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

The most influential Christian authors of the twentieth century believed that every human soul was caught up in a very great story: a fearsome war against a Shadow of Evil that has invaded the world to enslave the sons and daughters of Adam. Yet those who resist the Shadow are assured that they will not be left alone; they will be given the gift of friendship amid their struggle and grief. Even more, they will find the grace and strength to persevere, to play their part in the story, however long it endures and wherever it may lead them.

The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment Enough of this great work has now appeared For sightings to be taken, the ground cleared, Though the main purpose - what it's all about In the thematic sense - remains in doubt. We can be certain, even at this stage, That seriousness adequate to engage Our deepest critical concern is not To be found here. First: what there is of plot Is thin, repetitive, leaning far too much On casual meetings, parties, fights and such, With that excessive use of coincidence Which betrays authorial inexperience. We note, besides these evident signs of haste, A great deal in most questionable taste: Too many sex-scenes, far too many coarse Jokes, most of which have long lost all their force. It might be felt that, after a slow start, Abundance incident made amends for art, But the work's 'greatness' is no more than size, While the shaping mind, and all that implies, Is on a trivial scale, as can be guessed From the brash nature of the views expressed By a figure in an early episode, who Was clearly introduced in order to Act as some kind of author-surrogate, Then hastily killed off - an unfortunate Bid to retrieve a grave strategic lapse. More damaging than any of this, the gaps In sensitivity displayed are vast. Concepts that have not often been surpassed For ignorance or downright nastiness - That the habit of indifference is less Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes Are paid for never or a thousand times, That the gentle come to grief - all these are forced Into scenes, dialogue, comment, and endorsed By the main action, manifesting there An inhumanity beyond despair. One final point remains: it has been urged That a few characters are not quite submerged In all this rubbish, the they can display Reason, justice and forethought on their day, And that this partly exculpates the mind That was their author. Not at all. We find Many of these in the history of art (So this reviewer feels), who stand apart, Who by no purpose but their own begin To struggle free from a base origin.

In a remote area on the western side of the island, near the town of Marrawah, a pod of sperm whales was stranded on the beach. One big male came to shore first. Over the next twenty-four hours, another thirty-four whales stranded themselves, including calves and pregnant mothers. Whale stranding is one of the heartbreaking mysteries of the animal world. It is little understood. At this moment no scientific reasoning mattered as we encountered the tragedy unfolding on that Tasmanian beach. I felt so helpless. All I could do was be there as the huge, gorgeous sea mammals fought pitifully to stay alive. The weather was cold, even though it was officially the Tasmanian summer, and the seas were too rough to get a boat out to help the whales. We put our arms around the dying animals, spoke to them, and looked into their eyes to share in their pain and grief. By the end of the day I was so cold that I had trouble getting my pants off over my pregnant belly. It took me half an hour of struggling in the car park to strip off my soaking-wet clothes and get into some warm, dry gear. Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually, it had been an exhausting day. I pondered what communication the baby inside me would have gotten from the event. The dying whales had sung among themselves. Steve and I spoke back and forth over their stranded bodies. What did baby Igor pick up on? Through our experiences, we were beginning to form our very own tiny wildlife warrior, even before the baby was born. Igor had only just begun his education.

The Prince's Mead dance performances had always been preceded, for her, by such excitement that she was nearly sick from it, as though another body, another person, were struggling up from within her, that girl's exotic spirit rising up within her like a body from a grave, subduing her own nature by means of flashing looks and snapping castanets. She had loved those ritualized performances, yet afterward she had felt such grief, such disappointment that it was over, that she would not feel so inhabited again for another year.

The sense of struggling through the thickets of a nightmare again swept over her. There was a way out, so her heart's voice cried to her, and could she find it she would find also Damerel, her dear friend. But time was slipping away; in another minute it would be too late; and urgency acted not as a spur but as a creeping paralysis which clogged the mind, and weighted the tongue, and imposed on desperation a blanket of numb stupidity.

When you experience loss, people say you'll move through the 5 stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. What they don't tell you is that you'll cycle through them all every day.

We remain children for as long as our parents are alive. We always see them as invincible people. They are always standing by your side, protecting and guiding you. Their death completely changes our perspective on life, and everything involved in it. Regardless of our age, we will suffer from grief, and there’s no escaping it. You struggle with feeling like an orphan. You feel like you have lost direction and now you’re left completely bare, trying to figure out how to do life. The death of a parent can reposition your mental and physical space. You’re now at the forefront of life without any protection. You need to learn different ways to figure out your problem. You can have a few people assisting you, but nothing can be compared to the support of a parent.