Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment. Being in the presence of death can break you open, disgorging feelings that are deeper and more powerful than anything you thought you knew.
It still beats, doesn't it, still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locus for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense. There is no one to pick up the pieces because there are no pieces.
We live in an era when we diagnose ourselves and each other constantly, and we've developed an enormous infrastructure for explaining our problems. We've become very good at prescribing information, but information doesn't always provide consolation. Knowing more about grief, for example, isn't necessarily the same as feeling less alone in it.
She smiled sweetly at me then, offering some words of comfort: AH, WELL THAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH HAVING BOTH SETS OF GRANDPARENTS STILL ALIVE! WHEN THEY POP IT, YOU'LL BE SORTED!
Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it's not death we're afraid of but too much life.
The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater.
1mo ago
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. A thought is a substitute for everything, and to exchange one's self for it is to lose everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3mo ago
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
3mo ago
We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
He died after I tried to. I'm here and he is gone. D.S. Waldman revisits the space between his own near-death and the death of his brother, drawing on a trio of poems to better understand the narrow threshold that only one of them crossed.
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.
