Ps & Qs

[kayteeaay]

Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course, it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend — that everything that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.

– Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found

[kayteeaay]

There is no explaining the simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and become something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

– Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

[kayteeaay]

“But you’re not supposed to “get over”someone dying,” he says, “especially someone you loved… Thing is, you don’t ever go back, Maddie, to life before, and my advice is to accept that. To accept that you’re not the same person you were when your dad was alive and you can’t be again. Accept that your life is different now because of this monumental, irreversible change, and that it’s okay to feel guilty one day and indescribable happiness another. This is life now,” he says. “This is how you live.”

– Jessica George, Maame

[kayteeaay]

“I’m just really going to miss you, you know?”Alice’s voice caught in her throat. “I don’t know how many people I really, really love, who really, really love me, you know what I mean? I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s true.”

“It is true,” Leonard said. “But that love doesn’t vanish. It’s still there, inside everything you do. Only this part of me is going somewhere, Al. The rest? You couldn’t get rid of it if you tried. And you never know what’s going to happen next. I was older than you are now when I met Debbie. Time to go forward into the breach. Until the future, at last.“

– Emma Straub – This Time Tomorrow

[kayteeaay]

Alice had already spent so much time grieving in the present that she didn’t quite know what to make of having her father in front of her, awake. The idea of Leonard dying, and what it would mean for the rest of her life, was heavy, but it was a familiar weight. Not that Alice thought she had worked her way through it – if anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle, or Rubik’s cube; grief, with something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away.

– Emma Straub - This Time Tomorrow

[kayteeaay]

The light they brought with them stayed long after they’d gone.

– Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

[kayteeaay]

“Do you know,” she said slowly, “that the stars that we see the clearest are already dead?”

“Well, that’s depressing.” I took my hand from hers.

“No,” she said gently, linking her arm through mine, “it’s not depressing, it’s beautiful. They’ve been gone for who knows how long, but we can still see them. They live on.”

They live on.

– Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

[kayteeaay]

Somewhere, out in the world, are the people who touched us, or loved us, or ran from us. In that way we will live on. If you go to the places we have been, you might meet someone who passed us once in a corridor but forgot us before we were even gone. We are in the back of hundreds of people’s photographs—moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living room mantelpiece. And in that way, we will live on too. But it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have been a particle in the great extant of existence. I want, we want, more. We want for people to know us, to know our story, to know who we are and who we will be. And after we’ve gone, to know who we were.

So, we will paint a picture for every year we have been alive. One hundred paintings for one hundred years. And even if they all end up in the bin, the cleaner who has to put them there will think, Hey, that’s a lot of paintings.

And we will have told our story, scratching out one hundred pictures intended to say “Lenni and Margot were here.”

– Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

[kayteeaay]

It’s hard to know where my mother ends and I begin. Isn’t that the story with so many mothers and daughters? I remember when I was little she taught me what a Venn diagram was. We were on a train, from Chicago to Texas, to see my cousins. In the dining car, on a napkin, my mother carefully drew two circles, showing me the overlapping section. “What do these two circles have in common? Here…” she said, pointing. I was fascinated by the logic of that diagram.

Mothers and daughters: two circles, and the all-important bounded sections where they are complete unto themselves. Daughters perhaps have a tendency to point at the differences, mothers to point at the commonalities.

– Sarah Ruhl, Smile: The Story of a Face

[kayteeaay]

There never had been a moment like this in my life, so much love, and all of it free from doubt or exhaustion or misunderstanding. This love had always been there, it would always be there, no matter how I rewrote it or forgot it. I stood inside my gratitude and cried until finally I fell asleep.

That’s what I got from these books, the ability to walk through the door where everything I thought had been lost was in fact waiting for me. All of it. The trick was being brave enough to work. The books had given me that bravery, which is another way of saying the ability to believe.

- Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

[kayteeaay]

I’d been afraid I’d somehow been given a life I hadn’t deserved, but that’s ridiculous. We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.

- Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

[kayteeaay]

How could he have been so foolish? How could he have ever thought he could leave this place? It was color, bright and warm, and his heart felt like it was finally beating again. He hadn’t realized he’d left it behind. He should have known. He should have realized.

– TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

[kayteeaay]

Sometimes, he thought to himself in a house in a cerulean sea, you were able to choose the life you wanted.

And if you were of the lucky sort, sometimes that life chose you back.

– TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

[kayteeaay]

Grief orbits the heart. Some days the circle is greater. Those are the good days. You have room to move and dance and breathe. Some days the circle is tighter. Those are the hard ones.

– Steven Rowley, The Guncle

[kayteeaay]

Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

– Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

[kayteeaay]

If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at the old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. That someone my mother’s age could still have a mother. Why is she here slurping up spicy jjamppong noodles and my mom isn’t? Other people must feel this way. Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

– Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

[kayteeaay]

We is safer than I when you’re inside it, but it’s a tippy thing, unreliable, ready at any moment to toss you away and leave you exposed as an I after all.

– Maggie Shipstead, The Great Circle