Sandi Heinz’s Reviews > Things in Nature Merely Grow > Status Update

Inevitably there were people who wrote that they understood our pain because… they had lost a parent or a beloved pet. … These messages are not compassionate; they are clueless, even egotistic. … It’s not quite all right when you make yourself the center of the message: no need to remember your own losses, and no need to provide advice about how to overcome grief from your own triumphant experience.

“There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books, however, offer the approximation of it. … Writing, too, offers the approximation of salvation.”

“And who among the writers I’ve loved has summoned up the abyss in the precise way that I’ve experienced it?” -She seems so self-actualized and talks about radical acceptance. But what went so wrong?? The missing link is Christ 💜

“But life is neither practice nor rehearsal. The absoluteness of life – whether it’s life in an abyss or not – is that in each day, time has to be marked before the next day arrives. … Anything that marks time falls into the realm of the living. The dead, not going anywhere, do not need to mark time. They don’t necessarily help us mark time, either.”

Life, however, does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.

Death, particularly suicide, cannot be softened or sugarcoated. … their proposal seemed to me a disrespect of their own children and a violation of Vincent’s memory. Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.