to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.
Not deepest grief, Of course, Nothing can help you With that. Later, Maybe, but not now. Now you are unreachable, Alone with all that was Awry between you. Alone with what was said and not said. Saying it all Now freely confessing What you withheld then, Admitting what you denied Only a short while ago. How obvious that you Were often wrong and unkind. Aware of all the good Deeds you intended That remained undone. Aware of all the good Between you That Death has undone.
—Gregory Orr
. . .
In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
What I want shouldn’t be confused with final inactivity: life alone is what matters, I want nothing to do with death.
If we weren’t unanimous about keeping our lives so much in motion, if we could do nothing for once, perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness, this never understanding ourselves and threatening ourselves with death, perhaps the earth is teaching us when everything seems to be dead and then everything is alive.
