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    “The core of life is about losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic, over and over again, and also about loving and rising again. The cancer, the car accident—these are extreme experiences of other trajectories we’re on—aging, the loss of love, the death of dreams, the child leaving home. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They’re entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we’ll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.”

    Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 68)

      “…Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

      William Faulkner, The Wild Palms, via Sunbeams (Page 113)

        “Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.”

        Oscar Wilde, via Sunbeams (Page 82)

          “[Closure] is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.”

          Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 210)

            “I was dying.  And I couldn’t gain any kind of control on the situation.  There was no, ‘mind over matter-ing’ it for me.  My lungs were failing.  And I got hit with this huge wave of grief.  Which is not something that I had expected.  As someone who had always known that I would die young—and I had always accepted that and been okay with that—I was expecting maybe some fear, maybe some hesitation, maybe to turn into a 5-year-old then cry and want my mom… But I wasn’t expecting grief.  And what I felt grief for wasn’t the fact that I was dying, it wasn’t about fear of the unknown, it was none of that.  I felt grief for the life I could’ve lived.  I felt grief for life itself.  For all of the possibilities that it held.  And I was mad at myself.  I spent, literally, 30 minutes as my CO2 levels were rising and I slowly started to hallucinate, being thoroughly pissed at myself for waiting around for the world to tell me I was okay even though I was sick.  For waiting around for someone to tell me that I was healthy enough, that I was better enough, I was good enough to live a life that I wanted to live.  I wish that I yelled at every single person that had come into the room and said that they were sorry for me.” ~ Claire Wineland (20), EEM LA 2018