Grief Cottage

I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I thought I had outgrown. I hated it when these clusters started to form. One unwelcome subject sought out its counterparts—farewells, people leaving and never coming back, ambulances.... And then those counterparts attracted similar old hurts and horrors until you were trapped in the nucleus of the cluster. This cluster, I knew, was labeled LOSS in big black letters. I knew this much, thanks to therapy and training, but simply knowing it didn't protect you from reacting to it over and over again. Until one day you resolved to sit down in the middle of the nucleus, fold your arms, and invite the cluster to do its worst. And if you survived that, you could look around and see what was left in its absence.

After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother's been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.

because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.

The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself....If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk? Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.

Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.

I realized that below all our mes that become known to others is a self that nobody else can ever fully know. No self can ever share its entire being with another self, no matter how much love there is between them.

How would a person know that their father is the devil incarnate?” “You wouldn’t at the time. It would be later, when you were safe enough to look back. At the time all you would feel at first would be a misgiving, that something wasn’t as it should be. Later on, it may grow into a full-blown sense of wrong. But it’s a wrong you’re part of. You can’t do anything about it because you’re a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people’s lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know.

These days won’t last forever. No days ever do, though sometimes it’s hard to convince oneself of that.