Hold On to What You’ve Got
It feels like we created each other from scratch, scribbling in the details and watching ourselves take shape.
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Posts Tagged: grief
Improvising a Bone Graft
Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Getting Made (in honor of Ronan Louis and Emily Rapp)
The Rumpus joins yoga teacher Jennifer Pastiloff in remembering Emily Rapp’s son, Ronan Louis, whose brief, remarkable life ended in the early morning hours on February 15.
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Dirty or Clean?
I felt like an arrow of sheer desire, flying through the air in a small town and emblazoned with this unfortunate tag line: “Newly single mother of a dying baby.”
...more“Infinite Ache”
At Ebony, Saeed Jones reflects on the vastness of grief as the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death approaches.
“Now, though I sometimes cry, I more often feel a sense of awe at the depth of my connection to my mother.
...moreBrace Yourself
Jennifer Richter’s poems invite us to understand that each of us is a threshold—something pain passes through.
...moreJudith Butler At Guernica
“All I really have to say about life is that for it to be regarded as valuable, it has to first be regarded as grievable. A life that is in some sense socially dead or already ‘lost’ cannot be grieved when it is actually destroyed.
...moreJeanette Winterson on Grief, Being “Post-Heterosexual”
“Susie (Orbach) calls herself post-heterosexual. I like that description because I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don’t for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints.”
“Over the years I’ve had five letters from people saying that what I wrote stopped them killing themselves.”
“A lot of people … sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever.
...moreThe Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
This week, Rumpus books reviewed Terry Castle’s book of essays, interviewed Elaine Showalter, wrote about Nabokov, and talked about grief and Hamlet. Come see what you missed.
Grief And Hamlet
“My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing.
I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not foresee that, this time, for much of the time that I was most antic and most lost, most peculiarly undone, I would have taken from me (I would, I suppose, take away from myself) that which had always been of such solace to me.
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