secret-identity

This is a beautiful testament to friendship, canine and human: "Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part -- time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection." "She had entered that zone of infirmity difficult for the worried well to appreciate: We were all circling her like heartbroken hens, while Caroline was simply trying to swallow a bagel or get through a phone call." "I kept thinking of the phrase 'requisite mystery,' as though that could capture my necessary position in the universe now, poised on the line between Knowing and Not Knowing, between what seemed to me the arrogance of religious certainty and the despair of a godless world." "The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. ... I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity." "Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you though you couldn't stand to lose." "Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days, the real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end."

2022-11-03 23:09