Darya Zarya

“«THE GOOD THING ABOUT something awful happening is that you come out the other end having experienced growth. You become a better person. You become stronger. You become more accomplished. Unless you don’t.
The narrative of grief and loss is that surely there has to be an upside. Resilience! Superpowers! Eternal gratefulness! Extreme compassion! An appreciation of what really matters.

But what if there’s not? What if something shit just happens and then you keep being the person you always were. Just sadder. Maybe even a less-good version of yourself.
Not only do people want you to experience grief and loss unscathed (move it along now, it’s getting old) you must learn from it as well.»

«The world wants to see post-traumatic growth. It wants to see happy endings. A crescendo of grief and loss and pain and joy that leads to … something. Somewhere. But what if it doesn’t? What if awful things just happen because awful things just happen and we bear them? We endure.»”
― Natasha Sholl, Found, Wanting

“We swarmed through Africa and America because we were better than they, of course we were, we were making war humane, and now it has broken down and they are dragged into hell with us. We have doomed the world with our advancements, with our democracy that is so much better than whatever they’ve thought of, with our technology that will so improve their lives, and now Algerian men must choke to death on their own melted insides in wet Belgian trenches and I—”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“We need to re-meet it – the grief – at every stage. As life moves, we need to introduce ourselves again to our traumas, to work out how the empty spaces, the losses, fit in. It’s like rearranging the furniture whenever you move house. Things that once matched, suddenly look all wrong. A modular couch that once sat in the living room doesn’t work in its new configuration.

And I am discovering now all the endless ways to grieve. The long tail of grief. Not just in the missing of the person but in all these new ways for the grief to hit you. The closing of gaps. The outliving of birthdays. Death is not a finite event. It is unending. Unrelenting.”
― Natasha Sholl, Found, Wanting

“the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song