Grief

Andrew Holleran

Can we recover from grief? That is the primary exploration in this book through a simple story of one man who lost someone he loved. It gently presses the questions grief pointedly asks in the every day real stuff of life. Like whether to get up in the morning or not. How to physically act among other people when you feel distanced and disassociated. Where do you live? How do you interact with the possessions of your loved one?

What is the meaning of grief? Or where is meaning in grief?

Will we ever emerge on the other side and if we do, does this mean the person we are grieving is now gone from this earth? Are they only alive in us and if so what does that mean when others tell us we will get over it?

I really loved this excellent book. I would recommend it as a gift to someone going through grief along with Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking.

"Your grief is the substitute for their presence on earth. Your grief is their presence on earth." Pg 18

"What is better than reading in the same room or house with someone at night? Reading is an activity both communal and separate." Pg 61

"'Which is how people feel when people they love die, ' I said. 'That they are only marking time. That their lives have ended. Like Henry Adams - after his wife killed herself he went on living. He traveled, he moved into the home they had just built, he wrote books. But when someone aske him to speak to a historical society years later, he turned and said, "But didn't you know? I've been dead for fifteen years!"'" Pg 86

"At almost every concert, however, no matter how irritating, there was one piece - sometimes only a passage - that made you feel you'd done the right thing in coming here; that someone else (the composer) had understood, had known, your grief, that life was worth living because of music. At the same time, this music, or piece of music, also made it clear that you were fooling yourself in attempting to go on with your life; that what had happened to the person you loved you would never get over; that you still carried it with you; that it lay beneath all things; and only this music - these few notes - recognized that everything else you had been doing, and would do, to fill up the time was meaningless." Pg 97

Book 10