Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Saudis’ experience of modernity had been very different from that of the Egyptians, Pakistanis, or Palestinians. The Arabian Peninsula had not been colonized; it was rich and had never been forced to secularize. Instead of fighting tyranny and corruption at home, therefore, Saudi Islamists focused on the suffering of Muslims worldwide, their pan-Islamism close in spirit to Azzam’s global jihad. The Quran told Muslims that they must take responsibility for one another; King Feisal had always framed his support for the Palestinians in these terms, and the Saudi-based Muslim World League and the Organization of Islamic Conferences had regularly expressed solidarity with member states in conflict with non-Muslim regimes. Now television brought images of Muslim suffering in Palestine and Lebanon into comfortable Saudi homes. They saw pictures of Israelis bulldozing Palestinian houses and in September 1982 witnessed the Christian Maronites’ massacre, with the tacit approval of the IDF, of two thousand Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. With so much suffering of this kind in the Muslim world, pan-Islamist sentiment increased during the 1980s, and the government exploited it as a way of distracting their subjects from the kingdom’s internal problems.18 It was for this reason too that the Saudis encouraged the young to go to the Afghan jihad, offering airfare discounts, while the state press celebrated their feats on the frontier. The Wahhabi clerical establishment, however, disapproved of the Afghans’ Sufi practices and insisted that jihad was not an individual duty for civilians but was still the ruler’s responsibility. Yet the Saudi king’s civil government supported Azzam’s teaching for its own temporal reasons. A study of Saudis who volunteered for Afghanistan and later fought in Bosnia and Chechnya shows that most were chiefly motivated by the desire to help their Muslim brothers and sisters.19 Nasir al-Bahri, who would become Bin Laden’s bodyguard, gave the fullest and most perceptive explanation of this concern: We were greatly affected by the tragedies we were witnessing and the events we were seeing: children crying, women widowed, and the high number of incidents of rape. When we went forward for jihad, we experienced a bitter reality. We saw things that were more awful than anything we had expected or had heard or seen in the media. It was as though we were like “a cat with closed eyes” that opened its eyes at these woes.20

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Detroiter Ingrid LaFleur is the founder of Maison LaFleur and Afrotopia. Fashionista, artist, and most likely to make bank on bitcoin, she ran for mayor of Detroit in 2017 as an Afrofuturist candidate. amb. What do you like people to know about your pleasure activism? Ingrid. Fashion has definitely helped to define my pleasure activism. When my father passed away over a year ago I felt a grief I’ve never had before. After two months of being in a catatonic state, I began craving laughter and joy. I decided to wear the one thing that gives visual pleasure instantly no matter who is wearing it, sequins. I wore sequins every single day for about a month. Although my energy was low, my sequin jackets would make someone giggle, and then they would send me that good energy, which would soothe my wounds. It was, and still is, the best healing therapy I’ve experimented with. I continue to wear sequined jackets, now paired with heart-shaped red glasses, in hopes to generate more love and joy in my life and others. amb. What is your pleasure philosophy? Ingrid. I believe every moment of every day should be a pleasurable experience. If it is not, then it is time to question what is happening and why you decided to endure it. I also believe pleasure generated through our own power should resonate as far into the future as possible. If I eat something that tastes super-delicious but makes me sluggish and tired and sends me into a spiral of body shaming, then that was not a pleasurable experience, no matter how juicy and delicious it was. However, if I eat something fresh, clean, and healthy for my body then I will feel empowered and energetic simply because I have exhibited my love for self. Ultimately, love for the self is the deepest pleasure we deny ourselves. I work daily to be courageous enough to indulge in the purest pleasure of self-love. amb. How does Detroit inform and benefit from your approach to pleasure? Ingrid. Detroit taught me about pleasures derived from participating in and supporting innovative ancestrally rooted loving communities. This is a soul-satisfying pleasure that is aligned with my values without compromise. The more compromise, the less soul-satisfying. It’s tricky because addictions can blind us to this truth. amb. What are your actual daily practices of pleasure? Ingrid. I would love to create more rituals of pleasure. At the moment, because of my nomadic life, I have pleasure goals I try to maintain to help me keep clarity and that are necessary no matter where I am living—daily meditation for twenty minutes, keeping a clean kitchen (food is medicine), making the bed, and drinking a fresh green juice at the beginning of each day. Also, accomplishing work goals set for the day brings pure joy and gives me permission to play. amb. Time-travel for me: what is the most pleasurable possible future you can imagine?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s tongue was its own language, a language that didn’t need to be taught to it. When the riverwoman came in her mouth, Ama didn’t rinse it for days, kept tonguing the salt between her teeth. The riverwoman flipped onto her stomach and the mud opened around her, her limbs waning back into her body. Red scales rushed up her belly like a flame and she slid forward through silt, belly-flopping back into the river. Back home, Ama undressed and scrubbed the mud from her dress, but it had ground itself too deep into the weave and become inseparable from the fabric. She shook it out, went outside to dry it anyway, and saw something clinging to its hem. A scale the size of her toenail. Ama placed the scale on her tongue and sucked on it all day until it blurred away. When her belly rose as rapidly as bread, she knew this would be her last daughter. Ama thought of the riverwoman whose belly never left the ground, the way her hips gave into honey. The scale Ama swallowed: It must have doubled itself inside her, daughtering. This daughter was only hers. Hers and the river’s. Hers and the dead’s. This daughter—my mother—was the one Ama would see as her second body, a liability. Months later, when Ama tossed all her daughters off the bridge and into the river red, she would watch the snakes warring over their meat. She was waiting for the riverwoman to bring her daughters out of the water, her tongue hooking their mouths, dragging them back to the surface. While Ama was dropping her daughters into the river, trying to skip the last baby like a stone, she thought of water as the best of all mothers. Water had none of its own wants: It served only the thirst of others. Ama knew being needed was a kind of divinity, and she was tired of being that good, that god. When she dropped my mother into the river last, Ama thought: I am returning her to the river that will raise her better, raise her like a flood I will run from. _ In her house there was only her. When we’d pulled away, I’d looked through the back windshield, holding Agong’s head in my lap like a fruit I couldn’t figure out how to fit in my mouth. Ama watched me from the dark of her doorway, her knees blurring into each other. Her mouth was pitted from her face, a hole where she once had a name.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost. The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly. In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST . That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust. After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba. I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat. When Ma married him, he was twenty years older. Take the number of years you’ve lived outside of my body and plant them like seeds, growing twice as many: that’s the thicket of years between your grandmother and grandfather. Except Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields where she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar. Once, Ba asked her to teach him to write the Tayal alphabet she learned from the missionaries. But she said his hands were not meant to write: They were welded for war, good only for gripping guns and his own dick. Jie thought this was funny, but I didn’t laugh. I have those hands. When you were born, I saw too much of your grandfather in you: rhyming hairlines and fish-hook fingers, the kind that snag on my hair, my shadow, the sky.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I said that wasn’t true anymore. She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You’re not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about the women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language. I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey. When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body. I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her. My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life? I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt. Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe. Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We wanted one more day of missing her. We wanted it back, our grief—we wanted it real—but grief was just another thing we lost, another thing she took from us. _ Sometimes I thank shangdi you won’t ever leave home for a man. You can leave me for anyone but a man. Jie gets married two weeks after her graduation. The boy is nineteen and Cantonese and works as an auto mechanic at his father’s garage, which is where they first meet. Jie is a serial roadkiller, collecting smashed pigeons on her windshield, daily scraping the dogs and raccoons and squirrels off the fender. When I’m riding with her, that’s how I calculate our speed: in miles per dead thing. Jie finally decides that something must be wrong with the car. Maybe it’s some kind of animal magnet. Maybe she needs new brakes. So she drives it down to the garage, and the boy is there with a wrench, looking at her in the reflection of his greased hands. Jie gets married on a Saturday. She stole a bolt of sateen from her second factory job and I sewed her dress from it: It was sheer as rain, the kind of blue that looked green in indoor light, a border color. The morning of her wedding, Ma and Ba and I walk to the Baptist church and sit on the ass-dented pews and wait for the priest to speak. It’s morning and the boy’s family is also there, his three little sisters identically dressed in red sweaters and jean skirts. The sisters all stole a different part of their mother’s face: The youngest one took the flat eyebrows, the middle one got the mouth, the third one’s hair is already silver. The father is there too, in his mechanic uniform with a wrench in one hand, like he’s waiting for something to use it on. Ma refuses to meet them, so we sit on opposite sides of the church and don’t look for too long. Ma says, Don’t marry a man with more oil in his hands than blood. Ba’s hands are so greasy from the restaurant, he can’t work open our doorknob. Jie says that engine oil is different from food oil, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the boy is smart and going to college, and his oldest brother is a surgeon who once saved a girl with a hook-shaped heart. Jie gets married in a month without rain. From the kitchen, Ma says it’s an omen, says something about no children, but Jie says she doesn’t want kids anyway. At night, kneeling in the bathroom, she once tried to insert rat poison into herself, but she got it up the wrong hole.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Smoke ghouling up from the ground. Finally, my mother reached forward and took the match from Ama’s hand, striking it alive on her own callused palm. She lit the rabbit’s newspaper-shroud and I lowered its body into the sink, basketing the light in my hands. Even after we were gone, the rabbit-fetus burned. We searched for its bones in the sky, mourning that our agong was now moonless. _ In the car, I asked my mother if Agong was really her father. In Ama’s last letter, she’d written that my mother was conceived with the river, and Agong didn’t look like a river to me, except when he wet himself, his piss souring the seat, dribbling out of his bladder like the juice of a squeezed fruit. Instead of answering, my mother lowered the window and tossed out her cigarette butts. They dotted the street like acne. She laughed and asked me to define a father. I said it was someone who didn’t have the strength to carry his own name and had to employ others to do it. She laughed again, but this laughter sounded like a recording of the last, too repetitive to be real. I wedged Agong’s head between my knees, stroked the blank spot on his forehead where his eyebrows drifted in opposite directions, where he most resembled my mother: When she slept, the skin between her eyes pleated in two places, and she always told me to stay up by her bedside and iron it down with my fingers so she wouldn’t wake in the morning with wrinkles. But I always fell asleep beside her, and in the morning she asked if she’d aged. Yes, I said, you’re as wrinkled-up as an asshole, and then she’d laugh and roll me off the bed, saying that one day I’d have this face too. When my mother asked if I was begging for another story, I breathed steam onto the backseat window, wrote the word yes on the forehead of night. Turning onto the highway, steering with one hand only, she said the problem with memory was that I turned all of hers into currency, bought my future with forgetting. Keep your memories, then, I said. Give me someone else’s. _ An Abbreviated History of the River and Her Lesbian Lover (My Great-Grandmother Nawi) A NOTE OF CAUTION: All references to water may be slightly exaggerated, but when your agong is pissing all over the backseat, every river feels literal. A SECOND, AND MUCH BROADER, NOTE OF CAUTION: My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you’ve been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Before Dayi left, my mother said she was glad: Dayi’s useless. She’s practically a piece of furniture. Furniture is extremely useful, I said. Still, I wondered if one day Dayi’s legs would seam together, her skin leathering, her spine reclined like the sofa. Dayi always joked that she was becoming a goose herself, nested on our cushions, crumb-fed. When I asked if feeding her like a goose meant she’d never fly home again, she said this was already home. Here, where my mother replaced all the salt in her dishes with sugar, cooking everything so sweet we spat it back into our bowls when she wasn’t looking. Ants infested the kitchen. Dayi and I loved when the ants came. We used pieces of Scotch tape to pick them up in clots. We perforated their lines and counted the seconds it took for more ants to pour into the gaps we’d made. We liked to kill them one at a time, watching an entire lineage of ants walk over their dead, no one bothering to pick up the body or bring it home. We kept waiting for the queen to show, but we knew it was winged, somewhere above our heads and unkillable, her appetite an entire army. _ For a month after she left, my mother wouldn’t throw out the uneaten jars of baby food we had bought her, all the red flavors: beet and apple, mixed berry, rhubarb. When she died, we sent paper lotuses to be incinerated along with her body: My mother folded each palm-sized petal at the dinner table. At Dayi’s cremation on the island, my aunts lifted bone fragments from a tray with chopsticks and touched them to the light, discovering that Dayi’s bones were filled with red crystal. They broke all her bones open like geodes. Even her heart was candied bright as an apple. They sent my mother a bone splinter in the mail. It shot out of the padded envelope and bounced twice on our dining table, brazen as a blade. It was the length of my forefinger, blunt on one end and forked on the other. In my fist, the bone harmonized with my heat. Sang me to my knees. My mother said we should sheathe it in a sandwich bag and pulverize it, but in the end she kept it, filling a vase with beef blood and planting the bone upright, watering it every day to grow back Dayi. GRANDMOTHER Letter II: In which the clouds are eaten Dear second daughter, When you were born you laughed instead of crying.

• From The Art of Memoir

  students open their eyes with tears welling up. Sit a minute and let all this wash past. You should feel like you’ve been somewhere. If you’re really lucky, you found a way to occupy your former self, looking out of that face at your much younger hands. Congrats. That’s impressive. Most of us get a few snippets and glimpses. Now, here’s the pop quiz part: can you be in that place without falling apart? If you’re sobbing with shoulders shaking and big tusks of snot coming out of your face, the answer may be no. Call a pal, book a massage, go for a walk. You’re not ready to occupy this space for years on end. Yet. If you couldn’t see much or you felt nothing, you may not be ready, either. Or if you can only feel one thing, self-righteous rage— unless it’s a book about a larger atrocity (i.e., you’re a Sudanese “lost boy”)—this may not be your forte. Those of you who felt a living emotional connection to the past that struck you as real, those who’ve been somewhere, who brim with feeling and may even be crying, but are not devastated—come on in. Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you’re not yet sure of voice or anything else, you’re free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You’re free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader’s head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You might ask, though, who are you writing for? Lots of people say, “I write for myself.” I am way less cool. I tend to imagine a writer pal I look up to, maybe a former teacher; or my son; or even my dead priest. That helps me think clearly about what order information goes in. Again, if you were telling a therapist or a friend at lunch, you’d know right away what data went where. If you do have a reader in mind, maybe set down the scene in letter form, mustering as much carnal detail as you can feel. At the same time you’re going to try to describe your insides—either now as you watch this or then as you were in it, it doesn’t matter which

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Then I asked myself what I was to do next, and I almost turned on my heels and ran off. "As I stood there wavering, I thought I heard a faint moan. "I listened. All was quiet. "No, there was a groan—a low, dying wail. "It seemed to proceed from the white room. "I shuddered with horror. "I rushed in. "The recollection of what I saw freezes the very marrow in my bones. "'Even when I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold of my flesh.' "I saw a pool of coagulated blood on the dazzling-white, fur carpet, and Teleny, half-stretched, half-fallen, on the bearskin-covered couch. A small dagger was plunged in his breast, and the blood continued to trickle out of the wound. "I threw myself upon him; he was not quite dead; he groaned; he opened his eyes. "Overwhelmed by grief, distracted by terror, I lost all presence of mind. I let go his head, and clasped my throbbing temples between my palms, trying to collect my thoughts and to dominate myself so as to help my friend. "Should I pluck the knife from the wound? No, it might be fatal. "Oh, if I had a slight knowledge of surgery! But having none, the only thing I could do was to call for help. "I ran on the landing; I screamed out with all my might,— "'Help, help! Fire, fire! Help!' "On the stairs my voice sounded like thunder. "The porter was out of his lodge in an instant. "I heard doors and windows opening. I again screamed out, 'Help!' and then, snatching up a bottle of cognac from the dining-room sideboard, I hurried back to my friend. "I moistened his lips; I poured a few spoonfuls of brandy, drop by drop, down his mouth. "Teleny opened his eyes again. They were veiled and almost dead; only that mournful look he always had, had increased to such an intensity that his pupils were as gloomy as a yawning grave; they thrilled me with an unutterable anguish. I could hardly stand that pitiful, stony look; I felt my nerves stiffen; my breath stopped; I burst out into a convulsive sobbing. "'Oh, Teleny! why did you kill yourself?' I moaned. 'Could you have doubted my forgiveness, my love?' "He evidently heard me, and tried to speak, but I could not catch the slightest sound. "'No, you must not die, I cannot part with you, you are my very life.' "I felt my fingers pressed slightly, imperceptibly. "The porter now made his appearance, but he stopped on the threshold frightened, terrified. "'A doctor—for mercy's sake, a doctor! Take a carriage—run!' I said, imploringly. "Other people began to come in. I waved them back. "'Shut the door. Let no one else enter, but for God's sake fetch a doctor before it is too late!' "The people, aghast, stood at a distance, staring at the dreadful sight. "Teleny again moved his lips. "'Hush! silence!' I whispered, sternly. 'He speaks!'

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "I felt racked at not being able to understand a single word of what he wanted to say. After several fruitless attempts I managed to make out,— "'Forgive!' "'If I forgive you, my angel? But I not only forgive you, I'd give my life for you!' "The dreary expression of his eyes had deepened, still, grievous as they were, a happier look was to be seen in them. Little by little the heartfelt sadness teemed with ineffable sweetness. I could hardly bear his glances any longer; they were torturing me. Their burning fire sank far into my soul. "Then he again uttered a whole phrase, the only two words of which I guessed rather than heard were— "'Briancourt—letter.' "After that his waning strength began to forsake him quite. "As I looked at him I saw that his eyes were getting clouded, a faint film came over them, he did not seem to see me any more. Yes, they were getting ever more glazed and glassy. "He did not attempt to speak, his lips were tightly shut. Still, after a few moments, he opened his mouth spasmodically; he gasped. He uttered a low, choking, raucous sound. "It was his last breath. Death's awful rattle. "The room was hushed. "I saw the people cross themselves. Some women knelt, and began to mumble prayers. "A horrible light dawned upon me. "What! He is dead, then? "His head fell lifeless on my chest. "I uttered a shrill cry. I called for help. "A doctor had come at last. "'He is beyond help,' the doctor said; 'he is dead.' "What! My Teleny dead? "I looked around at the people. Aghast, they seemed to shrink from me. The room began to spin round. I knew nothing more. I had fainted. "I only came back to my senses after some weeks. A certain dulness had come over me, and the 'Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.' Still the idea of self-murder never returned to my mind. Death did not seem to want me. "In the meanwhile, my story, in veiled words, had appeared in every newspaper. It was too dainty a bit of gossip not to spread about at once like wild fire. "Even the letter Teleny had written to me before his suicide—stating that his debts, which had been paid by my mother, had been the cause of his infidelity—had got to be public property. "Then, Heaven having revealed my iniquity, the earth rose against me; for if Society does not ask you to be intrinsically good, it asks you to make a goodly show of morality, and, above all, to avoid scandals. Therefore a famous clergyman—a saintly man—preached at that time an edifying sermon, which began with the following text:— "'His remembrance shall perish from the the earth, and he shall have no name in the street.' "And he ended it, saying,— "'He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world.'

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Not long after we got home from the birth, I remember sitting in our living room and imagining clearly, as though it were unspooling on the rug at my feet, a labeled timeline of my life. At one end was birth and at the other death, and in between were a series of notches, like markings on a ruler. Puberty. First Job. Lost Virginity. College Graduation. Master’s Degree. Marriage. Restaurant. House. Child. As I’d made my way along the line, each notch had felt triumphant. Now I’d passed beyond “Child.” This was different. This too was a triumph, but it was also, I sensed, a turn, a U-bend in the line. This notch seemed to mark a rupture, the end to some ramping-up. I hardly remember June as a newborn. I remember my love for her like it was a room I lived in. When she was born, her eyes were late-evening blue. I remember looking at her swaddled in the crook of my arm, thinking, This person is my child. This person will be with me when I die. This thought made my chest ache happily, as reassuring as gravity. But a thought like that, I sensed, was only sane within the specific context of my life, with its specific history of deaths: my uncle Jerry when I was not even ten, and then on from there. My father was dead. The year after my father died, an uncle went too, his aorta exploding while he raked leaves. At twenty-five weeks pregnant, I saw my aunt Tina die. To love my baby was to be haunted. Ghosts filled the room of our love, kept us company. I knew I probably shouldn’t tell anyone about the ghosts, though it didn’t feel morbid to me. I never thought of hurting my baby or myself; that would have been something different. I found no pathology in the act of looking at my baby and thinking about death. This was grief, and grief was something I knew well. It was part of the old me, the pre-motherhood me. I was still here. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] When Brandon went back to work, June was two weeks old. He was exhausted. I was too, but I was more worried about him. Since the early days of Delancey I’d had a strange emotional tic, an impulse toward panic whenever Brandon was run-down or sick. If he was out of commission, it would mean more work for me. This felt true, and sometimes it was. Of course the line of causation was never so direct, never without complicating factors. But this did not dissuade me: I should, and would, make sure Brandon was all right. New parents are famously short on sleep, but the ones I’d seen, or heard of, had been able to manage it. We would manage it. I would manage it. Other mothers were able to. It occurs to me now that I didn’t know many other mothers.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  We blubbered in a wild chorus behind bobbing headlights all the way home. Maybe all my snubbing kept me from seeing clear. Or maybe, as Mother always contended, I just drove too damn fast, for when the car finally surged in the garage, there was a dull thump under the rear axle, a hollow sound like a dropped cantaloupe. I threw the car in park and crawled around in the exhaust fumes looking for what I’d hit. By the back tire on the shotgun side, there was a blood smear. It looked black as an inkblot in the red taillights. Of course, Bumper didn’t come when called. He was nowhere in evidence. Mother later believed she saw some animal’s white hindquarters slithering off into a field of saw grass and blackberries in back of the garage. But there were snakes galore in those weeds, Mother said. Maybe even nutria rats. She found him bloody and panting shallow on the back porch at dawn. She wrapped him in a lemon-colored bath towel and fetched him to the animal hospital. We only had a hundred dollars between us and planned to put him to sleep. But the vet offered to try some surgery for free. He put pins in the cat’s hips and wired his broken jaw shut. For years the doctor had heard outrageous tales in bars about this animal’s unlikely survival. The old cat might just make it.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  out, she finally decided, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that she would send me at least to England, having succeeded through the good offices of one of her theatrical friends in getting my name put down for one of the few children’s transports leaving Prague for London during those months. Vera remembered, said Austerlitz, that the happy excitement Agata felt at this first successful outcome of her efforts was overshadowed by her grief and anxiety as she imagined how I would feel, a boy not yet five years old who had always led a sheltered life, on my long railway journey and then among strangers in a foreign country. On the other hand, said Vera, Agata hoped that now the first step had been taken, some way for her to leave too would surely be found quite quickly, and then you could all be together in Paris. So she was torn between wishful thinking and her fear that she was doing something irresponsible and unforgivable, and who knows, Vera said to me, whether she might not have kept you with her after all had there been just a few more days left before you were to set off from Prague. I have only an indistinct, rather blurred picture of the moment of farewell at the Wilsonova Station, said Vera, adding, after a few moments’ reflection, that I had my things with me in a little leather suitcase, and food for the journey in a rucksack—un petit sac a dos avec quelques viatiques, said Austerlitz, those had been Vera’s exact words, summing up, as he now thought, the whole of his later life. Vera also remembered the twelve-year-old girl with the bandoneon to whose care they had entrusted me, a Charlie Chaplin comic bought at the last minute, the fluttering of white handkerchiefs like a flock of doves taking off into the air as the parents who were staying behind waved to their children, and her curious impression that the train, after moving off very slowly, had not really left at all, but in a kind of feint had rolled a little way out of the glazed hall before sinking into the ground. But from that day on Agata was a changed woman, Vera continued, said Austerlitz. What she had preserved of her cheerfulness and confidence, in defiance of all difficulties, was now overcast by a depression which she was clearly unable to dispel. I think she did make one more attempt to buy her freedom, said Vera, but after that she almost never left the building, she shrank from opening the windows, she would sit motionless for hours in the blue velvet armchair in the darkest corner of the drawing room, or lie on the sofa with her hands over her face. She was simply waiting to see what happened next, and above all she was waiting for post from England and Paris. She had several addresses for Maximilian—a hotel in the rue de l’Odéon, a small rented flat near the Glaciére Métro station, and a third place, said Vera, in a district I no longer remember—and she tormented herself by wondering whether at some crucial moment she had mixed up these addresses, so that it was her own fault if her correspondence had gone astray, while at the

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The definitive icon of Western Christianity is the image of a crucified man in an extremity of agony. It is an emblem of the cruelty that human beings have inflicted on one another from time immemorial. But it is also a pain that redeems the world. The Western Christian doctrine of atonement—one not held by the Greek Orthodox—is sometimes difficult to understand: it is hard to imagine how a compassionate God would demand such suffering as the price of our salvation. But the French philosopher Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) suggested an alternative: when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow feeling—and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us. The ancient Greeks, founders of the Western rational tradition, had a uniquely tragic view of life. Each year on the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, the leading playwrights of Athens presented tragic trilogies in a drama competition, which every citizen was obliged to attend. The plays usually dramatized one of the old myths adapted to reflect the problems and situation of the city that year. This event was both a spiritual exercise and a civic meditation, which put suffering onstage and compelled the audience to empathize with men and women struggling with impossible decisions and facing up to the disastrous consequences of their actions. The Greeks came to the plays in order to weep together, convinced that the sharing of grief strengthened the bond of citizenship and reminded each member of the audience that he was not alone in his personal sorrow. In his trilogy Oresteia, Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) showed that suffering was not only built into human experience but indispensable to the quest for wisdom. The three tragedies depict a seemingly unstoppable cycle of revenge killing. In the first play, Clytemnestra murders her husband, King Agamemnon, to avenge the death of their daughter; then the saga continues with the story of their son, Orestes, who slays his mother to avenge his father; the trilogy concludes with Orestes’ headlong flight from the Erinyes (also known as the Furies), the terrifying gods of the underworld who would hound a transgressor like a pack of wild dogs until he atoned for his sin with a horrible death. Suffering was a law of life, the chorus reminds the audience, but it was also the path to wisdom: Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  14 Kateri Tekakwitha: Mohawk Ascetic K ateri Tekakwitha’s short life encompassed a period of immense change among her people, the Mohawk. She is known today primarily through the accounts of French Jesuit missionaries who gathered testimony from her companions and family members. However, they saw through a European lens and wrote with a European audience in mind. In doing so, they misrepresented important periods in Tekakwitha’s life. By carefully examining her life and keeping her hagiographers’ own prejudices closely in mind, you can better understand Tekakwitha’s journey through a shifting cultural and religious landscape. Allan Greer, in his seminal work on Tekakwitha, Mohawk Saint, has done an excellent job of peeling back these layers and filling in details of the saint’s life from historians’ knowledge about Haudenosaunee customs and society. This lecture owes a great deal to his work. 103 14. Kateri Tekakwitha: Mohawk Ascetic Tekakwitha’s World In the mid-17th century, the area we know today as upstate New York and the Canadian border was very much in flux, caught between the French to the northeast, the Dutch and English to the south, and a variety of tribal nations with their own alliances and enmities. The Mohawk were the easternmost tribe of the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Five Nations or the Iroquois: a confederacy made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes. Tekakwitha was born in 1656, in the village of Caughnawaga, the easternmost village in the Mohawk territories. They had more frequent contact with trading posts and European settlements, and they were also more vulnerable to attack, both from their long-standing friction with the Algonquins and as wars between the French and British drew in native allies. Because of this, Caughnawaga lost its people at a high rate and adopted a correspondingly high rate of captives to replace them. Tekakwitha’s mother was one such captive. She was an Algonquin woman and had lived near a French settlement for some time—enough to become familiar with Catholicism and be baptized herself. It’s possible that she passed some of her beliefs on to her small daughter before dying in the great smallpox outbreak of 1661 to 1663, which also took Tekakwitha’s father and brother. Tekakwitha herself survived the disease, but it left her with scars and weakened eyesight. The Haudenosaunee approach to child-rearing would have ensured Tekakwitha enjoyed a stable and loving childhood despite her losses, guided by the many aunts and other maternal figures of her longhouse. Girls were especially treasured, since longhouses and clan affiliations were marked through the mother’s family. When Tekakwitha was 11, her community relocated to a new village site. There was a small chapel, although scholars estimate only perhaps 8% of the village was baptized Christian converts—and most of these were assimilated captives who had been born into tribes with larger Christian populations, as Tekakwitha’s mother had. 104

• From My People (2022)

  In his address, Julian discussed the trajectory of the movement and how the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, had changed its tenor, making people complacent, making them think that the victory had been won. In his soft-spoken but firm and confident way, he went on to suggest that this apparent victory had sapped the movement’s support. “Lack of interest is more killing than lack of money,” he said. “Negroes must not forget race consciousness as long as they are victims of racism.” Up until the day he left us, Julian never forgot that consciousness. He served as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center when it was founded and, in 1998, was elected chairman of the NAACP, a post that he never could have imagined occupying during his years with SNCC. And his consciousness went beyond race—he also became a climate change activist and an advocate for marriage equality. Julian Bond’s legacy surely lies in the fact that he steadfastly followed the movement’s dictum: keep on keepin’ on. The Death of a Friend Inspires Reflections on MortalityThe Root JANUARY 27, 2014 Something there is about the death of a friend or colleague close to your own age that makes you contemplate your own mortality. It happened to me several years ago when my good friend Ed Bradley passed, and it seems to be happening more frequently now as I am fully ensconced in my seventies. On a slightly chilly Sarasota, Florida, morning this past weekend, my husband, Ronald, and I headed to a deeply frigid Boston to join friends, colleagues, and family in memorializing the most recent of our friends to pass: Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin, who had left us a few weeks before at age seventy-four after what seemed like a very brief illness and a determined will to live. I often smile as I find myself imitating my late grandmother, who turned first to the obituary page when she opened the morning paper. I never knew until now why she did that. And I am not totally sure why I do—except, almost on a weekly basis, I find people I knew or knew about, who are a few years younger or a few years older than I am. People like Julius Chambers, once head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; the poet Amiri Baraka; and John Dotson Jr., who was one of the few black leaders in the newspaper industry. Like Ken Edelin, he died of a rare, aggressive cancer. And there are many more who, when I read of their passing, cause me to confront my own mortality—although for now, with the exception of a few arthritic joints, my health is good. But it is a time of life when I look at the “things” I’ve accumulated—including a closetful of shoes that would make Imelda Marcos jealous—and I find myself thinking about getting my house in order so that my survivors won’t have too big a burden once I’m gone.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Therese," I hear at last, "O Therese, is it you?" "Yes, my dear, my most tender friend," I cry, recognizing Rosalie's accents.... "Yes, 'tis Therese Heaven sends to your rescue . . ." And my numerous questions scarcely allow this interesting girl time to reply. At length I learn that several hours before her disappearance, Rombeau, Rodin's friend and colleague, had examined her naked and that she had received an order from her father to ready herself to undergo, at Rombeau's hands, the same horrors Rodin exposed her to every day; that she had resisted; that Rodin, furious, had seized her and himself presented her to his companion's frantic attacks; that, next, the two men had spoken together in whispers for a very long time, leaving her naked the while, and periodically renewing their probings, they had continued to amuse themselves with her in the same criminal fashion and had maltreated her in a hundred different ways; that, after this session, which had lasted four or five hours, Rodin had finally said he was going to send her to the country to visit one of her family, but that she must leave at once and without speaking to Therese, for reasons he would explain the day afterward, for he intended to join her immediately. He had given Rosalie to understand he meant to marry her and this accounted for the examination Rombeau had given her, which was to determine whether she were capable of becoming a mother. Rosalie had indeed left under an old woman's guardianship; she had crossed through the town, in passing said farewell to several acquaintances; but immediately night had fallen, her conductress had led her back to her father's house; she had entered at midnight. Rodin, who was waiting for her, had seized her, had clapped his hand over her mouth to stifle her voice and, without a word, had plunged her into this cellar where, in truth, she had been decently well fed and looked after.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  My father, who had received a maim on his limbs, that disabled him from following the more laborious branches of country drudgery, got, by making nets, a scanty subsistence, which was not much enlarged by my mother’s keeping a little day-school for the girls in her neighborhood. They had had several children; but none lived to any age except myself, who had received from nature a constitution perfectly healthy. My education, till past fourteen, was no better than very vulgar: reading, or rather spelling, an illegible scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work, composed the whole system of it; and then all my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy timidity general to our sex, in the tender age of life, when objects alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else. But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expense of innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her. My poor mother had divided her time so entirely between her scholars and her little domestic cares, that she had spared very little to my instruction, having, from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of guarding me against any. I was now entering on my fifteenth year, when the worst of ills befell me in the loss of my fond, tender parents, who were both carried off by the small-pox, within a few days of each other; my father dying first, and thereby by hastening the death of my mother: so that I was now left an unhappy friendless orphan (for my father’s coming to settle there, was accidental, he being originally a Kentisrman). That cruel distemper which had proved so fatal to them, had indeed seized me, but with such mild and favourable symptoms, that I was presently out of danger, and what then I did not know the value of, was entirely unmarked I skip over here an account of the natural grief and affliction which I felt on this melancholy occasion. A little time, and the giddiness of that age, dissipated too soon my reflections on that irreparable loss; but nothing contributed more to reconcile me to it, than the notions that were immediately put into my head, of going to London, and looking out for a service, in which I was promised all assistance and advice from one Esther Davis, a young woman that had beer down to see her friends, and who, after the stay of a few days, was returned to her place.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And I think Randy would probably agree with me. Or maybe he would argue with me. Maybe he’d be right to argue. After all, as I think about our Little League two-punch fight, I think I might have overreacted to Randy’s teasing. But, hey, I had been chronically bullied. I did have the grade school PTSD of a battered kid. So maybe I had been reflexively conditioned to meet any aggression, however mild, moderate, or wild, with my own aggression. I don’t know for sure. I will never know for sure. Because on December 8, 2016, Randy J. Peone died in a car wreck on a narrow two-lane highway north of Spokane, Washington. He was not intoxicated. The roads were clean and clear. The sky was blue. Visibility was good. Rowdy was alone in his car, so nobody knows for sure why he drifted across the center line and struck a car in the opposite lane. One of his brothers suspects that Randy might have been distracted by his phone. He liked to text and drive. The other drivers were hospitalized for their injuries but survived. There were also three children in the other cars, but they were not injured. Randy sustained massive head and internal injuries and died that night without ever regaining consciousness. He had not been wearing his seat belt. In 2016, what kind of foolish, impulsive, and risk-embracing idiot refuses to wear his seat belt? Come on, Randy! What were you thinking? I did not receive the news about Randy’s death until the next morning. I had been writing and, as usual, ignoring my cell phone. But then my sister called my home landline at the same moment Randy’s sister-in-law sent an urgent e-mail. I immediately called Randy’s sister-in-law, and she told me the terrible news. I had not spoken to Randy in many years. I had not seen him in an even longer period. But I was instantly transported back in time, and I wept and wailed like a twelve-year-old boy whose best friend had just died. I was Sherman Alexie Jr., mourning the sudden death of Randy Peone. And I was Arnold Spirit Jr., mourning the sudden death of Rowdy. My real and fictional lives blended in torturous ways. “Oh my God,” I said to his sister-in-law. “I loved him. I loved him. I loved him.”