Ari’s Reviews > The Year of Magical Thinking > Status Update

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point Archive we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

About five in the afternoon on the 24th I thought I could not do the evening but when the time came the evening did itself.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message thatching death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

When we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

We are repeatedly left with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that has become habitual.

Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead.

What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy?

As I remember you —
We stood there together on a high windy slope —
Our faces to the weather and our hearts full of hope

Until now I had only been able to grieve not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.