Marie’s Reviews > Notes on Grief > Status Update

“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I 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?”

“There is a sensation that is frightening, of a receding, of an ancestry slipping away”

“My mother is desperate for a firm date. ‘After the burial we can begin to heal,’ she says.”

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”

“His was a kind of naïveté, an innocence of the just.”

“Is that why I believe now in always trying? It is, of course, too easy to draw simple causative lines. It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.”

“So precious was my bond with my father that I cannot lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours.”

“There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief: the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema and ‘stop crying’ a refrain.”

“I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything. I want there to be a point, even if I do not know, for now, what that point is.”