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One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disa...more

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My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our fa...more

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Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belie...more

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He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would ...more

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(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, burstin...more

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Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and dimini...more

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There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

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The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

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Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.