Christina

“Recent psychological research on grief favors meaning making over closure; accepts zigzagging paths, not just linear stages; recognizes ambiguity without pathology; and acknowledges continuing bonds between the living and the dead rather than commanding decathexis. But old ideas about grief as a linear march to closure still hold powerful sway. Many psychologists and grief counseling programs continue to consider “closure” a therapeutic goal. Sympathy cards, internet searches, and friendly advice often uphold a rigid division between healthy grief that the mourner “gets over” and unhealthy grief that persists. Forensic exhumation, too, continues to be informed by these deeply rooted ideas. The experiences of grief and exhumation related by families of the missing indicate something more complex and mysterious than “closure.” Exhumation heals and wounds, sometimes both at once, in the same gesture, in the same breath, as Dulce described feeling consoled and destroyed by the fragment of her brother’s bones. Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration—of building something new with the “pile of broken mirrors” that is memory, loss, and mourning.”
― Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

“A girl Lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way. This girl in the woods is not lost. She is exploring.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“There’s precious little land in the United States that hasn’t been contested, one way or another, through the years. Americans live on haunted land because we have no other choice.”
― Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“if she didn’t sit down, calm herself, and close her eyes, she was going to smack the god of the dead across the face.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow