"You hold an absence
at your center,
as if it were a life."
— Richard Brostoff, from “Grief” (via proustitute)
"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning of the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them."
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
"You’re irreplaceable. And because you are,
the life you gave me is condemned to loneliness."
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, from “Prayer to My Mother” (translated by Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo)
"For me, joy never comes without the grief of knowing it is only ephemeral. All happiness carries with it the seed of its own end."
— Gabrielle Wittkop, The Necrophiliac (translated by Don Bapst)
"I’m writing
to hold on to you."
— Henriikka Tavi, “Mourning Cloak” (via ahuntersheart)
"…though grief would come later and it was a relief
to know I wasn’t alone…"
— Gerald Stern, from “Day of Grief” (via proustitute)
"I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
I found it in the wash, the orange
shell I picked up on the beach
that last time. One of my girls—
the one named after you—
must have found it in my room
and wanted it. Clean calcareous
curve, a palm open to nothing,
reeking of sunshine
and your death. For years
I didn’t know what to do with it.
You would have liked
this story: how a child
slips grief into a careless pocket.
Breaks it to pieces. Lets it go."
— Harriet Brown, “Shell”
"Mother, I have been devastated all my life."
— Leigh Stein, from “Marooned”
"When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me."
— Lisel Mueller, “When I Am Asked”
"You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed.
You give me grief, and how to grieve."
— Rebecca Lindenberg, “Catalogue of Ephemera” from Love, an Index (via lydianea)
(Source: heliophobus)
"What to do with this grief today? I don’t know what good is sadness unless we stand still with it, hold it under the tongue, savor it, and say to ourselves, “Here I am, if I had any doubt at all, here I am."
— Sandra Cisneros from her April 14, 2011 letter (via popca)
(via lover-root)
It reads:
Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love?
After his mother died, Barthes grappled with the complexities of grief, loss, and mourning by writing fragments on more than 300 index cards. The cards were eventually published as Mourning Diary.
(via Maud Newton)
"Nothing gapes wider than my wound
I cry over this disaster, over everything,
and feel your death more than my life.
I walk over the stubble of the dead,
and without warmth or consolation from anyone
I leave my heart behind, and mind my business.
Death flew off with you too soon,
dawn dawned too soon,
you were put into earth too soon.
I won’t forgive lovestruck death,
I won’t forgive this indifferent life,
I won’t forgive the earth, or anything."
— Miguel Hernandez, from “Elegy” (translated by Don Share)
"You grieve someone because you love them. Grief sharpens the edge of that love to something excruciating. Love amplifies that grief to something deafening."
— Rebecca Lindenberg, from an interview with The Believer
