Tag: grief

“We took turns sitting beside my dad and holding his hand. On the TV in the living room, the Tour raced.”

“I have to wear all of these dolls, you see, so that Whiteness does not have to wear any.”

How a journalist found her voice as her mother lost hers.

“In art and grief there are days you’re not proud of, days the emotions turn ugly, days the images don’t turn out the way you want. But that’s the human in us, and it belongs in the process. “

Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.

A hidden diary, a love story, and a mystery.

James Jung thought he rode the winding narrow roads of the Alps to memorialize his dad. He was wrong.

“I’m working on a book about Arctic explorers, and that means swimming in a sea of sorrow.”

In the wake of their parents’ deaths, three siblings struggle to get through the day-to-day.

Lockets simultaneously display and hide. But does squirreling our love and grief away in a piece of jewelry keep the memories and emotions present for us, or minimize them?

On masculinity, grief, and learning from suffering.

In isolation, Stephanie Land finds surprising relief from PTSD — and discovers she is able to write again.

Paraic O’Donnell chronicles the progression of his MS with clarity, beauty, wit, and no small amount of sadness. Picking the most striking paragraph in this essay full of them is a fool’s errand.

Jillian Dunham traveled thousands of miles from home to get away from her grief. It found her anyway, in a stranger’s Bangkok apartment.

“I’m writing my half of a dialogue that I know he would share with me if he could.”

“Though the embryo was only seven weeks old, I loved it. I loved it and wanted it, and its life ended.”

Five years after her mother’s death, while still grieving and suddenly middle-aged, Abby Mims turns to beauty products to cure what ails her.

“Cree First Nations believe ‘the northern lights are dancing spirits of loved ones who have passed on.’”

Wendy McClure recounts how an old audio tape of holiday music becomes a record of family history, unspoken rituals, and grief.

Carolita Johnson considers what it takes to recover from grief, build strength for the future, and become one’s own center of gravity again.

“The word he came up with was solastalgia, a portmanteau word of the Latin solus, which means ‘abandonment and loneliness,’ and nostalgia.”

Karen Brown recalls the pain and joy of fulfilling a deathbed promise.

A year after the Camp Fire, Tessa Love contemplates home, California’s undoing, and what it means to belong.

Carolita Johnson considers the emotional and physical labor required of women as their loved ones die.

One day, Ge Gao’s right hand stopped working. Then the pain started, and it’s never stopped.

The death of his life-long skateboarding friend prompts Aaron Gilbreath to get back on his board — at 44, with his toddler daughter in tow.

Vanessa Mártir introduces Writing the Mother Wound, a series of essays on mothering presented in collaboration with Writing our Lives and Longreads.

Alison Fishburn shares seven longreads on how humans experience the death of their pets.

After the death of her dog, Katie Gutierrez grapples with the ripple effects of her decisions — and how to live with uncertainty as a mother.

Years after her cousin was killed, Lilly Dancyger is haunted by images of murdered women in the news.