Steve Bauer :: "Something Wicked This Way Comes..." :: Cape San Blas, Florida :: R5M2, RF20mm, f/1.4, 8 Sec, ISO 6400
When you head out to shoot the night sky and you end up with storm clouds and someone on a four wheeler with a red light.
* * * *
âDeath doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.â
â Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
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âWhy the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?â
â Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
âDid you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?â
â Thomas Daggett, The Prophecy
Iâve been seeing this photograph posted a million times â it makes me feel melancholic. Itâs a starling on a roof, under the falling rain. itâs from Carina Sirbuâs portfolio. And itâs a great shot.
* * * *
âPeople once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul canât rest. Then sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.â
-James O'Barr
Thereâs a knot in my gut
As I gaze out today
On the planes of the city
All polychrome grey
When the skin is peeled of it
What is there to say?
The beautiful creatures are going away
Like a dam on a river
My conscience is pressed
By the weight of hard feelings
Piled up in my breast
The callous and vicious things
Humans display
The beautiful creatures are going away
Why? Why?
From the stones of the fortress
To the shapes in the air
To the ache in the spirit
We label despair
We create what destroys,
Bind ourselves to betray
The beautiful creatures are going away
Songwriters: Bruce Cockburn. For non-commercial use only.
Gratitude rewires your brain. Laughter is anti inflammatory. Crying helps regulate your nervous system. Releasing anger can free the body from tension it was never meant to carry.
Congratulations to Lindsey Graham for writing his own obituary ten years and two months in advance. The question of who deserves it remains, since the natural world and a whole lot of people in this country and beyond do not deserve it.
And yeah, I believe in what's often called "speaking ill of the dead" when it means calling things by their true names, not whitewashing destruction, corruption, and malice. âYou know how you make America great again?â Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. âTell Donald Trump to go to hell.â Then he became the foremost lackey and liar on behalf of Trump.
The Senate is now down two Republicans (since it's pretty clear McConnell is not coming back). Might be a good time to vote on a bunch of stuff.
6 cups cooked black beans
1 medium seedless cucumber, cut into Œ-inch pieces
4 œ ounces crumbled feta (1 cup)
â cup chopped cilantro, plus more for serving
3 scallions, thinly sliced
Πcup extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice, plus wedges for serving
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Directions
Combine all ingredients; season and toss:
Place cooked beans, cucumber, feta, cilantro, scallions, oil, and lime juice in a large bowl. Season with 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper; toss well to combine. Top with more cilantro and serve with lime wedges.
How to Store Black Bean, Cucumber, and Feta Salad
This salad can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 4 days.
Originally appeared: Martha Stewart Living, September 2018
A couple of days ago, I published an extract from Michel Conge's extraordinary book, 'Inner Octaves'. It was on attention, but, ironically, probably too long for effberk attention spans. So, here's the core.
"I am attention.
Where attention is, there am I.
If the attention is weak, I am weak.
If the attention is mechanical, I am mechanical.
If it is free, I am free."
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Ian Sanders
The Role of Attention in Self-Liberation :: Michel Conge
Man does not correspond to just one level of the universe, but to many. It is sometimes said in this teaching that a fully developed, real human being has his head at the level of the stars and his feet on the earth. This suggests not only a symbol but an actual ladder...
We need to understand that the two natures of man are inscribed upon this ladder: on the upper part of the ladder is the higher nature; on the lower part, the ordinary nature through which we manifest all the time and in which the centre of gravity of our whole existence is found. Unless we are aware of this twofold constitution and of the reciprocal positioning of the two natures on the vertical scale, we cannot possibly understand the difficulties of our existence and why we are alive.
Between these two natures, positioned in this way, there is an unbridgeable gap that we may call an âinterval,â a term corresponding to a cosmic vision of things.
Many ancient texts speak of this interval. In the Old Testament, for example, the struggle between Jacob and the Angel takes place in the very middle of a stream, at a ford, and it would be hard to understand why it is described that way unless we realized that a simple picture is being used to bring out the idea of a struggle and a particular difficulty where an interval occurs...
The idea that the source of life resides in the deeperâor higherânature is found in the Gospels. It is found, for example, in the parable of Christ at the well, where the Samaritan woman comes to draw water. âInterval,â âford,â âwellââthese are all symbolic images to make us understand that âliving waterâ must be sought beyond the place where we usually go...
Our dilemma is how to enable the two natures that constitute our being to unite. In order to achieve this, we absolutely need the knowledge of those who, through the ages, have become conscious and, having attained this union, seek to transmit true knowledge. This is a knowledge that does not belong to the level of ordinary life and cannot be acquired in universities.
This knowledge tells us that the higher nature seeks to unite with the lower; but that, because of this unbridgeable interval, this higher nature cannot be further incarnated into our present form as we are now. It also tells us that the lower nature seeks to unite with the higher, but gets lost in blind attempts...
These two natures fail to unite because between them a connecting element of a certain quality or of an intermediary vitality is missing.
In fact, the qualitative difference between these two natures of which we are constituted is so disproportionate that they cannot be joined.
When a person reaches this point, if he doesnât receive the help of objective knowledge ... he is lost. In order to overcome this difficulty, one needs access to what might be called âsacred science,â the science that lives through Holy Scripture but which people nowadays no longer know how to interpret. We must desire this âscience of being.â We must ask for it, know how to ask for it, and keep on asking for it from those who embody it.
Left to his own devices, a man tries to solve the enigma either with his intellect or with his feeling. But even if he calls upon his most intelligent form of thought, he cannot hope to attain this union, because his thinking can only use, but not invent, data. Or, he may call upon his feelings, but feeling alone cannot lead to union.
Likewise, if he thinks he can find the key to the problem in his body, in instinct, he will fail.
The functions are remarkable instruments, but their role is to be at the service of something greater. The secret resides in an entirely different quality. It resides in attention, in this living substance so poorly and so little understood, even though each of us has access to it. The fundamental idea is:
"I am attention.
Where attention is, there am I.
If the attention is weak, I am weak.
If the attention is mechanical, I am mechanical.
If it is free, I am free."
So we must come back to attention and understand that just as I am a being divided in two, attention in me is also divided in two.
There is a higher, hidden inaccessible attention over which I have no more power than I do over consciousness...
But there is an attention that corresponds to my lower nature. This attention is âfallenâ; it has become fragmented, has split into divergent currents. I can know this attention much better than I know it today. I can recognize myself in it, and thanks to it, come back to myselfâremember myself.
Attention enters into my functions, which are the channels it must take. And now I begin to understand why it is said that self-knowledge is, or begins with, knowledge of the machine. This body-machine has been given to me so that I can try and recognize myself as attention, and so that, at this level of ordinary life, three unconnected currents of attention can come together.
I must further understand that in this lower nature each current of attention can appear in different degrees of intensity. I need to learn that attention can show itself to have a completely unstable, vagrant character...
There is, however, a very different kind of attention, an attention that is really more conscious, more intentional. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, we discover the taste of it. If this occurs in my thought, I see that my thinking has become clear. And if it occurs in my feeling, I perceive a feeling completely free from my habitual emotions. As for my body, I can also experience what is happening at its level in a new way.
What is important is to learn that each of these degrees or qualities of attention corresponds to one of the three levels of my centres. For each centre consists of three levels, one above the other: a moving or mechanical level, an emotional level, and the highest, an intellectual level.
And knowledge of the correspondence between each specific taste of attention and each of these levels is a very great secret. If I learn to recognize this and experience it, the path toward union or reunification of the attention becomes apparent.
But I have to understand that these three paths must be experienced simultaneously... On the level of my ordinary nature, the return to a unified attention is possible only when the three essential centres of my lower nature unite at their highest level.
Only then does attention acquire a new character: it becomes truly voluntary attention, conscious attention. This conscious or voluntary character helps me understand that there is now something in this regenerated attention that can correspond to the properties of the higher nature...
Letâs look again at the idea of two natures. The higher nature should be the active, holding authority, and the lower should be passive, ready to serve. In fact, the higher nature remains passive and the lower nature, agitated, usurps the active sign. This anomaly arises from the separation of the two natures and the absence of any relationship between them. There is nothing between the two to reconcile them.
The same thing happens in each of my centres. I can understand this when I try to free my attention and it becomes activeâwhen real âIâ becomes activeâin relation to a mechanism that then becomes passive. At each step of the way, I experience the action of these changes in polarity.
Finally, when the highest level of the centres becomes active, a great event is in preparation: this whole nature, now unified and ordered, can begin to serve the higher nature. It has become passive in relation to the higher nature.
To the extent that I free myself from the tyrannical hold of the functions, and as my attention, charged with new powers, climbs the âladderâ of the centres and becomes concentrated, I discover that a new organization is gradually taking shape. This new organization is imbued with qualities of thought, feeling; and sensation that I did not know before. It is also the prelude to the formation of a new body, a spiritual body in relation to my present physical body. This new bodyâforming, condensing, and organizing itselfâis the previously missing intermediary element that is capable of uniting the higher and the lower natures.
From that moment, one can speak of vigilance, which is a capacity to live an effort in such a way that the polarities no longer reverse, and the joining truly occurs.
Now I must try to live, carrying all this in the intimacy of my heart, protecting it against anything that might destroy it.
~ âą ~
These excerpts are from Michel Congeâs book, Inner Octaves, Toronto: Dolmen Meadow Editions, 2007, pp. 141â151.
This church has always been on the right side of history, though this may be the most direct marquee Iâve seen in a while from them.
I found out yesterday that they sold the property to the city and theyâre going to be putting up affordable housing and tearing the church down soon.
Iâm honestly not really thrilled about any of this for various reasons.
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âI felt like I was back in Hawthorneâs Salem, learning the worst lesson of the witch trials: the public will bow to authority, no matter how corrupt, if they believe that authority is curtailing a greater threatâeven if the complicity of the authority becomes increasingly explicit. The longing for a legal system to combat an almost otherworldly evil overrides the publicâs ability to see the man-made evil right in front of them.â
â Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent
After my husbandâs death, I had never been more pliable, tender, open, or raw. It was then that I tried E.M.D.R. therapy.
In 1967, Leonard Cohen released âSo Long, Marianne,â a requiem for a love affair that was unravelling, or at least transforming in some critical way. The song is romanticâthe Marianne of its title was Cohenâs girlfriend and muse in the nineteen-sixtiesâbut its fourth verse contains what Iâve always thought was a profound articulation of grief:
Your letters, they all say that youâre beside me now
Then why do I feel so alone?
Iâm standing on a ledge and your fine spiderweb
Is fastening my ankle to a stone.
I listened to âSo Long, Marianneâ dozens, possibly hundreds, of times after my husband experienced two catastrophic seizures and died, in the summer of 2022. The spiderwebâthe object of my griefâbecame both a tether to and a protection from danger. The night of his death, I left the emergency room in the gauzy predawn hours, carrying our thirteen-month-old daughter. I was alone, stupefied with shock, mentally replaying a scene in Joan Didionâs âThe Year of Magical Thinkingâ in which a hospital social worker gestures toward Didion and asks, âIs this the wife?â I had not been assigned a social worker. Maybe that meant my husband wasnât dead. I felt hot and weightless, as if my feet werenât making full contact with the ground. A nurse had offered my daughter a little package of crayons, but she was too young to use them, and now I was clutching them in one hand. I woke up my sister, who was living in New England. Her voice was tight but steady on the phone. I must have sounded insane. I let her assume the controls: Buckle the baby into the car seat. Is she safe? Are you sure? Get in. Put on your seat belt. Start the ignition. Are the headlights on? Can you drive? Are you sure? It felt as though I were a dazed passenger attempting to land a nose-diving airplane. I tried not to think about the clatter and thud of his body being slid into a refrigerated compartment. My parents lived fifteen minutes from the hospital; they were standing in the driveway when I pulled in. Had I phoned them? The horizon was a soft and murky pink. Did I open the car door and fall out? Did my mother get the baby? I donât know. My husband and I met as teen-agers, and married in our late twenties. Later that morning, I called his family. I called his boss. I called our friends. Most of them answered the phone cheerfully.
My daughter and I stayed with my parents for a couple of months. When I went back home for the first time, to collect some toys and clothes, I cleaned streaks of my husbandâs dried blood off the floorboards and threw up in the kitchen sink. Then I cleaned that up, too. I put his eyeglasses, still cloudy with fingerprints, into a drawer. It seemed impossible that he didnât need them anymore. When I was presented with a rendering of my husbandâs headstone, after pawing through a binder of unhinged-seeming designs (did he want an etching of the Buffalo Bills logo?), it felt like a gag gift, something that friends might have mocked up for his birthday. It suddenly seemed so easy to disappear. âMedia vita in morte sumus,â someone said at the funeral. In the midst of life we are in death.
My situation was, on some level, achingly ordinary. People die all the time. Or worse things happen. My father lost his father when he was a toddler. My mother lost her sister when she was a teen-ager. My husband lost both his parents. After a while, a sort of austere survival instinct kicked in for me. My existential panic was subsumed by more pragmatic concerns. When a death is quick, and the practical ramifications are both vast and immediate, any platitudes associated with âgoodâ grieving feel like luxurious fantasies. There was no time for grace. I was astoundedâfixated, on some levelâby the irresolvable mathematics of my scenario. My household income had been halved, and my domestic responsibilities had doubled. I was now a single mother, with a slate of grisly and endlessly regenerating administrative chores, most of which concluded with the faxing of a death certificate to an institution, accompanied by a deranged note saying âThanks!â I returned a car that we had bought a few days prior to his death, sitting in the exact same stiff, faux-leather chair at the dealership, trying to explain to the very smiley salesperson that my husband, whom heâd recently shaken hands with, was not alive anymore and I didnât need two cars. He was flummoxed, then horrified. My parents had to finish the paperwork. Between grief-induced insomnia and waking in the night to care for my baby daughter, I was feral with exhaustion. The tiniest decisions were paralyzing. Was the trash full enough to take out? Was her fever high enough to call the pediatrician? What was for dinner?
Grief mangles cognition and memory in ways that can make even banal tasks feel surreal, if not impossible. When a bank clerk asked me for my daughterâs birth dateâI was attempting to add her name to our savings accountâit felt as though Iâd been charged with solving a math equation. I did my best. I boxed up and donated my husbandâs jeans and sweaters. I took his toothbrush out of the holder and threw it in the garbage. I ordered a new sofa. I thought that if the room looked different I could begin to resolve some of the dissonance of sudden loss. I indulged in my share of magical thinking. The question that hounded me the most that fall was: Where did he go? Perhaps thatâs why the word âlostâ is so synonymous with deathâit can feel as if your person is simply misplaced.
I went back to work. People marvelled at this, as though it were a choice, but I needed money, and I needed to engage some cooler, steadier portion of my brain. Unfortunately, I found music largely unlistenableâan inconvenient development for a professional pop critic. The emotional circuit that my favorite songs lit up inside me was too vivid; music felt overwhelming, if not revolting. There were a few things I could stand: Nick Cave and the Bad Seedsâ âGhosteen,â P. J. Harveyâs âStories from the City, Stories from the Sea,â Paul Simonâs âGraceland,â anything by Leonard Cohen. Some Nina Simone, some Miles Davis. Listening to most records felt shaky, ominous, like reintroducing food after a stomach bug. What could I receive without retching? Somewhat serendipitously, I was already in the midst of reporting a Profile of Metallica, a band famously preoccupied by death. (Metallicaâs bassist Cliff Burton died in a ghastly bus accident in 1986, when he was twenty-four, an event that haunts even the current iteration of the group.) I now found the singer and guitarist James Hetfieldâs clenched-fist articulations of despair wildly comforting. Death was interesting to him. These songs both normalized pain and made it beautiful. Understanding that this was even possibleâthat grief could shape-shift into something less ugly, less weakâkept me going.
Appearing steady around my subjects was hard. (One afternoon, while watching the indie-rock band the National rehearse at its airy, sunlit studio space in Hudson, New York, I had a fairly sizable breakdown in the bathroom, stifling my sobs with a mitten.) But I was grateful for the sense of control I felt when writing. The real work of nonfiction, and of profile writing especially, is in making a series of arbitrary and disconnected events legible. The best profiles force a coherent arc from a string of mostly random occurrences: of course it all happened just like that. Writing was a corrective to my reality, which felt incoherent.
The rawness and terror of that first year was so visceral and embodied. âAnd grief still feels like fear,â C. S. Lewis wrote, in 1961. His wife, Joy, had recently passed away, of cancer, at age forty-five. âPerhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.â I was locked in a kind of defensive crouch. My daughter surely sensed the hum of my heartbreak, though I tried to be soft, even joyful, in her presence. I was toggling maniacally between otherworldly love for her and anguish that her father was dead and she would have no memory of him. During nap time, Iâd tiptoe out to the driveway, sit in my parked car, place the baby monitor in my lap, and weep into the hood of my sweatshirt. Part of me wanted her to know that grief is a reasonable reaction to a devastating occurrence, but mostly I just wanted her to remain connected, in the way children are, to the ecstasy and wonder of existence, without any premature knowledge of its concomitant pain.
I got very good at sensing when the heft and finality of the loss was making someone uncomfortable. I found this both relatable (I surely wouldnât have known what to say, either) and alienating. Grief canât be âfixedââdeath is famously irreversibleâso conversations about it require both parties to abandon problem-solving and accept a kind of unpleasant stasis. When well-intentioned friends or colleagues asked me how I was doing, I felt dread. What I wanted to say was This feels exactly as bad as you think it feels. What I usually said was Yeah, Iâm O.K.
I was having a hard time connecting with anyone who hadnât locked eyes with a particular sort of darkness. I sought out people who felt complicated and fucked upâwho were able to reckon in some way with the lunacy of human life. In 1986, a trio of social psychologists introduced an idea called terror-management theory, based on the cultural anthropologist Ernest Beckerâs claim that fear of death is âthe mainspring of human activity.â (Beckerâs book âThe Denial of Deathâ won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1974.) T.M.T. posits that civilization itself is largely a response to mortalityâan elaborate system of distraction and repudiation. Because humans have a sophisticated and symbolic awareness of death, we invest aggressively in shared cultural beliefs, which âprovide the universe with order, meaning, value, and the possibility of either literal or symbolic immortality.â Simply sitting with the idea that death is compulsory and irreversible is too hard. Most of us will do almost anything to forget it.
Yet becoming a young widow was easily the most fascinating thing that has ever happened to me. In fact, it often felt like the only thing that had ever happened to me. In a 2019 conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper, Colbert spoke about the isolation of grief, even decades later: âWhy is nobody asking me about this? My brothers died forty-five years ago, and sometimes Iâll go, âHow come nobody is asking me about Paul?â â I knew what he meant. Talking about anything else felt nuts. It was hard not to think of âmoving onâ as a kind of annulment, a final act of severance. In this context, the whole idea of recovery seemed vaguely dehumanizingâtoo results-oriented, too transactional, too American. Who was I to believe that I could vanquish the ache of death?
I liked speaking with people who could acknowledge the enigma at the core of existence without feeling embarrassed. One afternoon, the Episcopal minister whoâd performed my husbandâs funeral service said to me, only half jokingly, âI guess he has all the answers now.â I found the idea that heâd suddenly been made privy to cosmic information both funny and comforting. Rare air; good for him. In 2023, Paul Simon released a thirty-three-minute album of acoustic hymns titled âSeven Psalms.â Simon spends most of the record musing about a higher power and what happens, or doesnât happen, when we die. On âThe Sacred Harp,â a gentle and circuitous song, he sings, âThe Lord is my personal joke / My reflection in the window.â I repeated the phrase like a mantra.
Encountering new motherhood and acute loss in quick succession was harrowing, though I eventually came to see them as deeply consonant experiences. Both required enormous amounts of selflessness, stamina, plasticity, courage, and improvisation. I reminded myself to take it day by day, or, sometimes, minute by minute. I sent a lot of weird texts to friends. I posted very personal things on Instagram. I fumbled a few relationships. I wanted to be around people all the time, but I also couldnât bear anyone needing anything from me, including my polite participation in a social interaction. At Christmas, my daughter and I caught the flu. We stayed home by ourselves. I had a panic attack at the pediatricianâs office, triggered by the sound of a blood-pressure machine in another room, or the starchy crinkle of parchment paper on the exam table, or maybe just the ambient smell of rubbing alcoholâit was all too close. I yanked off my mask and tried to suck in just enough air not to pass out. The situation was so grim that it was almost funny; I was so sick I couldnât stand. On Christmas Eve, I had to crawl up the stairs, one arm dragging my body, the other cradling my baby, who was ruddy with fever. At that moment, I could not imagine ever feeling good again.
In 1999, The New Yorker ran a cartoon of two beleaguered cowboys looking out over a cliff with the caption âHard to tell from here. Could be buzzards. Could be grief counsellors.â Itâs difficult to say when grief tips from normal to pathological. Itâs even more difficult to say when it might require intervention. âI donât think that any grief is pathological, actually,â Katherine Shear, the founder and director of the Center for Prolonged Grief, at Columbia Universityâs School of Social Work, told me recently. âItâs a little bit analogous to pregnancy, in the sense that itâs a normal state, but itâs a high-risk state.â She continued, âThe problem people have is not in the experience of grief itself. The problem is how to learn to accept the unthinkable.â
The Center for Prolonged Grief, which was founded in 2013, is an academic institution focussed on education and research. (It is not a brick-and-mortar clinic open to the public, though in the months immediately following my husbandâs death I often yearned for a place like that: something in between an urgent-care center and an A.A. meeting, where the mental and physical symptoms of bereavement are recognized, and the ebb and flow of sorrow doesnât require explanation or apology.) The centerâs work is largely supported by outside grants, though it also generates income through its clinical-training programs and workshops. Shear first studied internal medicine but then decided that she wanted to be a psychiatrist. She completed her residency at Cornell in the late nineteen-seventies, when, she said, grief was not very well understood by clinicians. âA group of colleagues who were doing depression research had started seeing people who were bereaved and thought they were depressed,â Shear said of her time as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, in the early nineties. âThe depression treatment wasnât working, basically. Those colleagues, like almost all mental-health professionals, including myself, knew almost nothing about grief. Everybody knew that loss is important, but grief wasnât in the curriculum.â In 2005, Shear published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association that demonstrated the efficacy of a treatment plan for âtraumatic grief.â
In March, 2022, a revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included something called prolonged-grief disorder, which for adults is defined as debilitating, life-altering grief that is still ongoing a year after loss. Shear led a committee that lobbied for its addition. (The World Health Organizationâs ICD-11, a global analogue to the DSM, gives a timeline of six months for the same condition.) According to some estimates, P.G.D. could affect about seven to ten per cent of all bereaved people. The diagnostic criteria include âintense yearning/longing for the deceased personâ and âpreoccupation with thoughts or memories of the deceased person.â A P.G.D. diagnosis hinges chiefly on time; clinically, at least, the difference between functional and nonfunctional grief is duration.
[...]
Grief forces a kind of radical transformation, for better or for worse. I found it to be a shockingly generative state: Iâd never been more pliable, tender, open, or raw. Miracles, catastropheâit all felt so possible in those early months. In that way, grief itself is a psychedelic journey. Shortly before the one-year mark, when I theoretically would have been qualified to seek out a P.G.D. diagnosis, the shape of my grief changed again. It began to feel less like a slowly unfolding apocalypse and more like Iâd been handed an invisible shieldâas if my intimacy with pain had led to a kind of immunity from it. Some days were still hard, but most days were O.K.; eventually, the hard days were aberrations. Music was listenable again, even the really sad songs, though a few still got me. (The first time I heard Zach Bryan sing âYour funeral was beautiful / I bet God heard you cominâ,â I had to pull my car off the road.) I developed a new and funny admiration for the ways in which music distilled and centered emotion. I liked that songs, for the most part, took living seriously. I did, too. I found a rhythm to life as a solo parent. I got better at asking for and receiving help. I was more forgiving. The future felt sort of interesting again. Then, incredibly, the future felt almost exciting. What a bold and miraculous thingâto be alive at all.
I was still meeting regularly with my original therapist. Our sessions became less about triage and more about integration. I told and retold the story; she repeated it back to me when I needed to hear it. Eventually, I learned to cultivate an odd kind of gratitude for my grief, and for the very modest miracle of my own survival. Itâs possible that E.M.D.R., or some aspect of it, helped me claw my way back from what had seemed, at the time, like the end of my life. Ultimately, I didnât really care about the therapyâs scientific bona fides. All I had wanted was to stop feeling as though the world was unsafe and everyone I loved was about to die. Besides, what did science really know about death, or what happens afterward?
The primary thing I recall from E.M.D.R. is unrelated to the therapy itself. Often, at the beginning or the end of our session, my therapist would remind me, firmly and repeatedly, to grieveâto suffer. I canât remember how he phrased it; possibly, it was as simple as him saying, âLetâs make sure youâre really grieving.â It felt bizarre, even sort of grating: all I was doing was grieving! Yet, in retrospect, I understand it as a remarkable kindness. Humans are instinctively averse to pain, conditioned instead to solve and strengthen and maximize, to inure ourselves to hurt. The idea of willingly spending some indeterminate amount of time feeling bad is unthinkable. But that was how I understood his counsel: feel bad. A bad thing happened, and it is reasonable to feel bad. Thrashing against it was both exhausting and fruitless. The experience reminded me of the woven bamboo finger traps I played with as a kidâthe harder you tried to free your hands, the tighter and more frightening the whole thing got. To feel better, I had to find a way to value and nurture my grief. To understand it as some invisible but essential system inside me. âŠ
By Amanda PetrusichJune 22, 2026
Published in the print edition of the June 29, 2026, issue, with the headline âAround a Dark Corner.â
"âŠthe world will open the arms of God to us. It is for us to throw ourselves into these arms so that the divine milieu should close around our lives like a circle."
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