And here's the thing about terror, although it may well be true of grief, too. It robs you of so much. It steals your soul. It takes your life. It robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place in the world. And it murders time.
I think some essential part of me is still there. And here's the thing about terror, although it may well be true of grief, too. It robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place in the world, and it murders time.
Li's teenage sons both died by suicide six years apart, Vincent in 2017 at age 16, and James in 2024 at age 19. Her Pulitzer-Prize winning 2025 memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow , chronicled the loss of her sons and her effort to go on.
I think I've had the feeling both times after my children's death, that words often fall short. And falling short doesn't mean not succeeding. Falling short doesn't mean failing. But when I started a new project, I would like a subject that words naturally fall short. So music is that choice.
People who have experienced tragedy often feel abandoned by God, or feel that God is punishing them. But Rabbi Kushner came to believe that God is not the cause of our suffering — that bad things happen because the world is imperfect, not because God wills them to happen to us.
having him near always made me feel better. So that wasn't even part of it, because I never felt there was judgment coming from David. It was always just joy and pleasure.
Soundtrack for the apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pool pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone.
I went to the library and I looked everywhere and talked to the research librarians for books about families coming through cancer, and it just wasn't there. This is 1977. You didn't say the word cancer.
My father got sick with a metastasized melanoma in his brain when I was 23, and he was still the center of our family. My brothers and I just adored him. He was like our higher power.
We are never above a laugh. There's nothing that's grave enough for us not to laugh about because that's how we process our pain. It's like we laugh through death and sickness and sadness.
It's hard to tell people about grief. It's hard to talk to people about poverty... and so I'd got very used to the silence in my own life, and my writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.
by revenging the death of our parents, we are not going to bring them back to life. That's it. They are dead. And by avenging their deaths, we're only going to escalate the cycle of bloodshed, of pain, of suffering that we, we Palestinians and Israelis, have been trapped within for a century.
The depth of our emotions and our commitment and our love for someone and how much they love us is directly correlated to the grief you're going to feel.
7mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
