"My body was in convulsions. The crying, the shaking. How would I go on? She was me. She was my protector, my guardian, she understood me better than anyone in the world, she loved me as nobody ever did, as nobody ever would. How am I going to live? How is it possible that her whole world is gone? Everything. Her thoughts, her love, her feelings, her stories, all the languages she spoke, all the books she's read, all the thoughts she'd ever thought, her whole, entire life. Gone. Forever. How is that possible?
Then I looked in the mirror. And saw my face. My crying face. I looked at the image of my face in the mirror as if I saw it for the first time. Suddenly calm, I was watching it carefully. I was looking at the face in the mirror, a familiar but foreign face. A face disfigured by grief. With a strange detachment, I saw myself watching myself. Myself in that extraordinary situation. Suddenly I was a scientist observing a human being in the most vulnerable, most painful circumstances. I found myself in both roles: I was the observing scientist and the object of the experiment. I was the experimenter and the experiment. I was the observer and the observed. I was in it and outside of it. Detached and calm, I was watching the face in the mirror: it was red and swollen, my forehead wrinkled, all the lines pronounced as if I had suddenly become an old woman, tears forming in the corners of the eyes and then falling out, jumping out, as if shot out by some miniature gun hidden inside. I watched myself watching the process in the mirror, in some kind of weird double exposure. I kept observing every detail on that - my! - face, with the sharp focus of a mad woman. Wait, let's see: can I make myself cry at will? Let me try. Yes, I can. Look, I can stop the tears, then make them come again. I am playing with my own grief. I will the grief to life, then dismiss it. I make it come, then let it go.
Suddenly, I feel a strange contentment, a sort of fulfillment: I am in charge of my emotions. I am a double person. I am stricken by grief, but I am also able to control that grief, observe it, invite it, and dismiss it as I choose. A smile comes over my face: I'll be fine. Acting will be my salvation from life, from pain, from unhappiness. I will use my pain, I will turn it around, away from me, and I will send it out into the world, converted into a different entity. Will that new entity be art? I don't know. Maybe, if I'm lucky. But I know, I instinctively know that this alchemy might take away the debilitating power of pain. Because I will be in control. Not my pain.
I came out of that bathroom transformed. I knew I had the weapon against pain. I felt as if I had been given a set of tools not only for my profession, but for my very survival. And again, it felt like a religious epiphany. But it was not God that intervened. It was my mom. She was the one who gave me this parting gift."
- Mira Furlan, Love me more than Anything in the World
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The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe
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“Visitors offering their condolences, meaning to comfort me, said, 'Life goes on’. What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and for ever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.”
— The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer
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O death where’s your boast
Where’s your glory
What of your pretension
Have you left
Foolish was your pride
And vain ambition
You tried and were found
Wanting in the end
And all you did was all
You could and yet it failed you
For Jesus rose and sank
You to the grave
And in resurrection
I refuse to fear you
O death you died and
I’m alive instead
And o death where’s your bite
Where’s your triumph
Quickly how the tables turned
It seems
You must have thought
That friday sealed your victory
But sunday came
And trampled on your scheme
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I believe in death.
I believe it is the last wonderful work.
"Shelley," Mary Oliver West Wind
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In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window
In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing
All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window
All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes
— Sufjan Stevens, 'Casimir Pulaski Day'
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End. Finis. Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there is nothing but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have been Vincent de Paul—it makes no difference. That is the truth. Then live your life, above all things.
In today's e-mail from the world of Les Miserables, we're having existential crisis with the senator, while our good bishop listens
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"She is going to die."
"When is she going to die?"
"Before we get back"
As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner
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