Nicole’s Reviews > Notes on Grief > Status Update

“A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness to feel to death. The awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency, an impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have?”

“I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal. Grief telling you it is over, and your heart saying it is not. Grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present. It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.“

“It is not so much about what my father says, as it is about being with him. A laugh that I will never laugh again. Never has come to stay. Never feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

“The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post sleep. A leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge: I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.”

“Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say ‘This is what you will never again have’. Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain.”

“the smug certainties of a person yet unaquainted with grief. I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am at the center of its churning.”

"I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and of all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual… how is it that the world keeps going breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”

“Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?”