themarginalian.org

A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Brandon Berskson

Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a French survivor, wrote the book as a letter to her father, who died in the camps. The way she recounts what Auschwitz did to her, and how the pain never ceased even after liberation, moved me to such a degree that I've read the paperback three times.

themarginalian.org

The Loveliness of Letting Go: An Illustrated Ode to Life’s Lasts

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother's voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving.

themarginalian.org

How to Live and How to Die

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of sacred cake on my tongue and try to taste my mother, to discern the message she baked in these loaves when she was too ill to eat them: I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.

longreads.com

A Dying Art

With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.

themarginalian.org

The Wild Iris: Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering

It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little.

themarginalian.org

How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won't be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo

It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.

longreads.com

The Feeding

She wanted to forget having been sick, while I was in the next room, sobbing like she was already gone.

longreads.com

How Three Chess Friends Battled Demons and Saved Two Lives

Though the woman died almost 20 years ago, Paul said, the curse remains in effect.

themarginalian.org

No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life

Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.

longreads.com

They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout

While I struggled to find Persian words for Trías's tales of quiet loss, the air outside was thick with the scent of gunpowder and the final breaths of a generation.

longreads.com

‘Their Power Feels Like Mine’: A Dog Sled Racer Says Goodbye to Her Pack

I want to call their names, so they know I'm here. I want to guard them in secret forever.