Grief and Loss

Twenty-five years after 9/11, I am writing about that morning for the first time: the fear, helplessness, waiting, and grief for a future we thought we were promised. At 26, I had no words for what I was experiencing as I watched the world change from my sofa. Today, I am a thanatologist with the vocabulary to understand mortality salience, collective mourning, and shattered assumptive worlds—and to sit beside that young woman and comfort her.

A funeral is something we perform for the dead, certainly. But perhaps it is also something we do with them. We accompany them.

Dolly Parton and Tim Curry occupied opposite ends of the cultural imagination: she embodied light, sparkle, and a carefully constructed persona; he became darkness, transgression, and transformation. Their deaths at 80 invite reflection on celebrity, aging, memory, and the archetypes public figures become. We may never have known them, yet they inhabited our lives. The mortal body dies; the archetype remains.

The Hero's Journey provides a narrative structure through which the profound disorientation of loss can be understood not as failure, but as the difficult process of learning to inhabit a life whose old map no longer describes the territory.

Grief refuses to stay inside the neat emotional categories we try to impose upon it. Music offers something unusual. It doesn’t ask us to explain what we are feeling. It simply gives those feelings somewhere to go. Many bereaved people instinctively understand this. Some create playlists filled with songs that remind them of the person who died.

Exploration of death themes in diverse world myths.

April missive about why we bury the dead.

What happens to us physically and mentally when death becomes real

Art does not arrive after loss as a gentle comfort. It appears when the opposition becomes unbearable. When presence turns into absence. When life collides with death. When love no longer has a living recipient.