We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, s… - Joan Didion

The heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is: the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.