aomamesmoons

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No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.

– Haruki Murakami

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"Grief is closely allied with anger. They are expressed with similar sounds: moans, groans, shouts, and screams. Like anger, grief responds to a terrible loss or terrible harm done — but without any sense of the possibility of reparation. Anger turns the pain outward, against others; grief turns it inward, to the self. People subsumed by rage try to replicate the wrongs they have suffered by hurting others. Those consumed by grief long to turn their own bodies into that of the dead loved one, by lying down in the ground, cutting the hair, scratching the face, and rolling in the dust. The enraged want to humiliate, hurt, or kill; the grief-stricken want to be dead and to inhabit the perspective of the dead.

But grief is different from anger, because it can be expressed and experienced collectively. Through the funeral rites and games for the dead Patroclus in Book 23, Achilles shares his loss with other Greek warriors, just as the Trojans in Book 24 are able to share their grief at the death of Hector. Even enemies, like Priam and Achilles, can share a moment of grief. Anger drives communities apart; grief brings them together, over a shared acknowledgment of irredeemable loss."

Emily Wilson's Introduction to The Iliad, p. xliii

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"I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small."

– Callista Buchen

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Alessandro Baricco, Silk

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Christmas Eve at the Grave (1896) by Otto Hesselbom ❅ New Year’s Night (1984) by Sergei Andriyaka

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silliest girl award

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THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023) | Teaser Trailer dir. Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli)

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reading + kitties

[aomamesmoons]

I knew depression to be unrelenting, invariable, impervious to event. I knew its pain to be undeviating. Grief was different. It hit in waves, caught me unawares. It struck when I felt most alive, when I thought I had moved beyond its hold. I am so much better dealing with his being gone, I would say to myself, assured by some new pleasure in life. Then I would be flung far and cold by a wave of longing I could scarcely stand.

Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was The Same

[aomamesmoons]

‘It will get easier’ is probably the most offensive thing you can say to someone in the grip of pain. You are borrowing from a future that isn’t promised, a future that depends entirely on their endurance of the pain. You are taking for granted a well of strength within them that they may not possess, fast-forwarding through the ugly bits that you don’t want to watch but that they must live through, nonetheless. ‘It will get easier’ is not a helpful thing to say to someone for whom only the present moment can exist, so vivid, so intense that it’s not possible to imagine a moment beyond it.

Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting

[aomamesmoons]

Dreaming is underrated, I think, so often dismissed as a fanciful, childish, passive activity for immature people not rooted in reality. But sometimes, reality is truly unbearable, not worth enduring, and dreaming offers the only way out of it: a light in impenetrable darkness, even if it's an illusory one you conjured by your imagination. And that's the great thing about dreaming; you don't have to have a shred of self-worth to do it, you only have to have imagination.

Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting

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“I think you lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world inside you.”

— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

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How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from Notes on Grief

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“I’m in pain because the day is ending and somehow l am never healing.”

— Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait In Letters

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“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”

— Anne Sexton, “Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters”

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🐈‍⬛

[aomamesmoons]

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from Notes on Grief