“I didn’t know my voice would be so full of grief, my sentences like cries strung together. I didn’t even know I felt grief until that word came, until I felt rain streaming from me.”
— Louise Glück, from “Trillium,” The Wild Iris
-Shadow Self-
-Depression-
now that it’s impossible,
i want to ask you everything.
there’s a grief (that can’t be spoken)
have another drink, have another cry, have another scream, come on, keep going, let it all out. if you keep going on like this you’ll lose your voice and you’ll let yourself be blinded and you’ll be deaf to the cries (and the music) you only ever wanted to hear. have another moment for yourself, have another minute to your name, have another drink. why not?
Something about holes
(Poem by Grendel Vincent Menz)
C. S. Lewis, from “A Grief Observed,” originally published c. 1961
C. S. Lewis, from “A Grief Observed,” originally published c. 1961
“Grief is a circular staircase. I have lost you.”
— from “The Five Stages of Grief” by Linda Pastan, in The Five Stages of Grief
“I don’t think people understand how stressful it is to explain what’s going on in your head when you don’t even understand it yourself.”
— Sara Quin
-1:25am
& i’m still here with all this grief, my heart, that knife-toothed conversation, the same poem, written over every day since.
& there will be no more metaphors about light. not after the one about the sun & how i swallowed it that november. how it hasn’t been back since. how my father still won’t look at me.
the dirty, bloody thing has a name & i won’t say it. i’m not soft. i sleep late. crash cars. put my fist wherever it does not belong.
even the dead know this (& the dead know this better than i do): a body is only a body while it will have you. a body never stops to lick its lips.
This heartbreakingly beautiful statue is called Melancolie. It was created by Albert György (living in Switzerland, but born in Romania) and can be found in Geneva in a small park on the promenade (Quai du Mont Blanc) along the shore of Lake Geneva. This profoundly melancholy piece evokes powerful emotions in most who view it, and many find it easier to find words to express their grief in its presence. As a grieving parent John Maddox wrote, “We may look as if we carry on with our lives as before. We may even have times of joy and happiness. Everything may seem “normal”. But THIS, “Emptiness” is how we all feel…all the time.”
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
“I have folded myself forward and back again to find you. Bent diagonal and straight, till I am nearly torn apart. I have raised up a mountain of mourning, furrowed a valley of sadness, pleated my cries in repeated corrugations, reversed and pleated again, fashioned whole pockets of lamentation, then tucked myself into them, turned myself inside out, crimped my pain into sharp points. And still no boat, nor goldfish, no paper crane, no likeness of you. All I want now is to undo myself, lay me flat again, like a sheet on a bed of healing, smooth out the creases of my grief, and sleep.”
— Jeanne Emmons, “The Origami of Grief,” River Styx (no. 100, May 2018)
