Grief

The recent Sunday NY Times had an article about grief that I'd like to quote in part. It was a discussion between Joyce Carol Oates & Meghan O’Rourke, both writers who have recently lost husbands and published books drawn from their experiences.

Oates: [T]he old life is gone, the old love has vanished. Grief is the most humane of emotions but it is a one-sided emotion: it is not reciprocated.

O’Rourke: It reverberates among the living, though, in our shared laments. Because the mystery of all this is that lamentation is consoling instead of just painful. Consider “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams:

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.

That cold fire is strangely warming, isn’t it? And so we burn through the days, passing from one person to the next the lit match of memory.

Passing a lit match to you in memory of those we've lost, which loss always seems to feel recent. Photo from MOMA taken 7.Jan.2011