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Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not ...more

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Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

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I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

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Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live ...more

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My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry....more

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We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now ...more

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...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments d...more

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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...more

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I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger c...more

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Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

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It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

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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 loss...more

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The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us a...more