Meagan

“Just look at us, all of us, quietly doing our thing and trying to matter. The earnestness is inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time.”
― Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal: Not Exactly a Memoir

“In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“Dying / Is an art, like everything else," wrote Plath, whose lifelong flirtation with death went too far one fateful February morning. And art is nothing if not subjective. In the same vein, when I think of Virginia Woolf, it is not merely as a helpless participant in the morbid fascination that has sprung up around these two writers--but of the windows of time of their deaths. The time it took Woolf to fill her pockets with rocks. The selection of those rocks. When does a suicide begin? When do we start counting? At the riverbank or in the river? In the kitchen the night before or the next morning? Rilke warned the "we must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape."

That's nice. But it's hard to throw something like that together at the last minute.

What gruesome work suicide makes of grief! Sometimes I conflate blame and action, sometimes I separate them as if in a moral centrifuge, sometimes I think it doesn't matter either way.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People

“Perhaps this is the plainest definition of anxiety: mourning what isn't gone yet. Anxiety is an ever-present stage of grief, a shadow attached to the heels of its more infamous siblings.”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People: A Memoir