after all, girls are taught to be polite and accommodating. Being rude or blunt would be a display of bad manners. Historically, women have ignored their instincts, alerting them to danger because they don’t want to overreact or, God
...more
“You’re driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, ‘Goddamn it. What gives you the right to laugh?’ Because nothing has happened to them. You don’t understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air. It leaves no room for anyone else. Grief and I are left alone a lot. We smoke cigarettes and we cry. We stare out the window at the Chrysler Building twinkling in the distance, and we trudge through the cavernous rooms of the apartment like miners aimlessly searching for a way out . . . Grief is possessive and doesn’t let me go anywhere without it. I drag my grief out to restaurants and bars, where we sit together sullenly in the corner, watching everyone carry on around us. I take grief shopping with me, and we troll up and down the aisles of the supermarket, both of us too empty to buy much. Grief takes showers with me, our tears mingling with the soapy water, and grief sleeps next to me, its warm embrace like a sedative keeping me under for long, unnecessary hours. Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“When a daughter loses a mother, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. The result? A sense of inner fragility and overriding vulnerability. She discovers she’s not immune to unfortunate events, and the fear of subsequent similar losses may become a defining characteristic of her personality.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“I don’t know what the opposite is of the Midas touch, but you shitbirds have it.”
― THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case
― THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case
Gena’s 2025 Year in Books
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