"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
- Charles Bukowski
I read somewhere that humans don't die just once; people go through various different deaths in the course of a lifetime, all presented in different forms and shapes. Shapes we can’t fully recognize or identify until some time has passed and we’re able to see things from a distance. The loss of a loved one, a relationship, a job, a future, an idea; death is a chameleon, and in its wake, it leaves behind the bittersweet taste of nostalgia in our hearts. A gut-wrenching, sometimes-agonizing taste that can remain dormant for weeks, months, years, until one day something triggers it, and we’re suddenly back to square one as if no time had passed.
Below you’ll find ten essays about grief and loss in all the different ways they come:
1. To Grieve is to Carry Another Time by Matthew Salesses
Recently I realized that I was reading books about time because I wanted one to tell me how to go back in time — to before my wife died of cancer.
2. On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic by Jesmyn Ward
During the pandemic, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house, terrified I would find myself standing in the doorway of an ICU room, watching the doctors press their whole weight on the chest of my mother, my sisters, my children, terrified of the lurch of their feet, the lurch that accompanies each press that restarts the heart, the jerk of their pale, tender soles, terrified of the frantic prayer without intention that keens through the mind, the prayer for life that one says in the doorway, the prayer I never want to say again, the prayer that dissolves midair when the hush-click-hush-click of the ventilator drowns it,
3. The Aquarium by Aleksandar Hemon
4. What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind by Jennifer Senior
Bobby’s daily planner is cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.
- My Own Life by Oliver Sacks
- Letting Go by Atul Gawande
Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die
7. Neuroscientist David Eagleman on How the Physiology of Drug Withdrawal Explains the Psychology of Heartbreak and Loss by Maria Popova
People you love become part of you — not just metaphorically, but physically. You absorb people into your internal model of the world. Your brain refashions itself around the expectation of their presence. After the breakup with a lover, the death of a friend, or the loss of a parent, the sudden absence represents a major departure from homeostasis. As Kahlil Gibran put it in The Prophet, “And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
8. The Terrorist Inside my Husband's Brain by Susan Schneider Williams (Robin Williams' wife)
9. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg
Note: Sheryl Sandberg served as chief operating officer of Meta Platforms until August 2022. This is not an essay per say, it's a Facebook post (it's very good!)
10. Lottery Tickets by Elizabeth Alexander
Additional resources/recommendations below:
Books:
- A Very Easy Death by Simone De Beauvoir
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
- Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert D. Richardson
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
