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 Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  They each had to admit to the other that their future didn’t include each other. They owed too much to themselves to sacrifice their deepest wishes for another person. It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other—it’s just that they loved their personal values more. This wasn’t a selfish choice—it was an act of authenticity that spared them from continued years of pain. I think the only thing they may have regretted was that it took ten years of anxiety to figure this out. They each had kept waiting and waiting for a change to come. As they saw, as is the case when it comes to the consistency of values, it never did. Perhaps this is something for you to get curious about in your own life. What are you waiting . . . and waiting on right now? Is there something you’re desperately hoping will change but at the same time, you’re not doing much about it? Perhaps this is where your own ultimatum can come in handy. Give yourself a deadline. Let’s play this out: WHAT’S A CHANGE OR STEP THAT YOU MAY NEED TO TAKE THAT YOU’VE BEEN PUTTING OFF? IF YOU WERE TO GIVE YOURSELF A TIMELINE TO MAKE THIS CHANGE, WHAT DATE WOULD YOU SET? (TWO WEEKS, THREE MONTHS, SIX MONTHS, A YEAR?) This is where you can get really honest with yourself. Here are some examples: • If I’m still hating my job in three months, I’m going to start applying to other positions. • If they’re still not ready to move in together when my lease is up, it’s time for me to end this relationship. • If I’m still feeling the itch to move to a new city in six months, I’m going to take steps to change locations. • If I’m still miserable at this school at the end of the semester, I’m going to change my situation and apply to other programs. WHAT’S YOUR ULTIMATUM (#BOUNDARY) THAT YOU NEED TO SET FOR YOURSELF? (“IF THIS DOESN’T CHANGE BY [X DATE], THEN I’M GOING TO [INSERT ACTION HERE].”) The key is that you clearly communicate these expectations with others. If you’re dissatisfied with the current standing of a relationship or situation, it’s on you to express what you’re hoping to see change. Tell your family if they’re supporting you with school that you may be transferring. Let your roommate know that you’re considering other living arrangements before you bail. People can’t read your mind. It’s unfair to put parameters in place without outlining them first to the people in your life who will be impacted the most. Ultimately, you don’t need to continue waiting for your life to happen to you.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  18 7% as home of bees; fertile, Dai ag 13° (E); 37 *AN Ct 6"; “DW poplars of wady Ly 23° (H), Jb4o”; OD נ'‎ Is x5 needing water Gn 26” (173 3), לצ‎ (J), cf. 1 3°"; place for refuse, ruins, 060. 28 17"; also as wild, remote ravine Jb 30°, cf. שור‎ הַנחָלִים‎ 2274; place of child-sacrifice Is 57° burial-place Jb נ')21%%‎ °297).—Nu 24° vy. 1. 2M Particular wadys designate localities: J Nu 2 ד‎ (BE), Dt 2274.36.36 0 4% Jos ד‎ a3 (all D), וש ירי‎ bovix Nu 329 (J) Dt 1% Twa 18 30: גד‎ 2 24°; 212 (EK), Dt 2°34; pa) Gn 32" (J), Dig Jos 12?(all D); קַרְרון‎ 28 15% 1 K 2" הז‎ 8 23°52 2 Ch 58 29! 30" Je31*; map Jos xl 17°? (all P); PUY Ju16*; DWT “2 Jo 4%" מִצְרִיִם‎ is SW. limit of Pal. (As. nahal [ma Musri, D1?**-*"° Schr 007 895) Nu 34°(P), Josme (D), v7 (P), 1K 8* 2K 247 200 *ך‎ Is27™, + (om (מצרים‎ Ez 47" 48% (v. supr.); so rd. also poss Am 6" (v.21: usually identified with Wad el-Arish; on Wkl’s different view, v. reff. sul o's) ad fin.); on identif. of “3 Jos 15/ 19 (both P), 2S 23%=1Chr1™, 2 Ch 20% 3345 Comm.; הַנחָלִים‎ IWS Nu 215 v. TR, | 3. Miner's shaft, “3 713 Jb 28+ tu. [oni] n.[m.] perh. palm-tree (Ar 13S, n. unit. ו‎ v. Perles?® 3a, 1899, 688) «_ only pl. abs., *82 גו אך ָּנְחָלִים‎ 2 like palm-trees which are stretched out, spread out (as i foliage). So Perles**, who compares נחל‎ ‘JW Ececlus 50°, 69 as crehexyn powikar. / Sedna n.pr.loc. (=valley—or pa of Ei) ;—station of Isr. E. of Dead Sea Nu2 (JE), poss. (if =valley) one of main tribu of Arnon, e.g. W. Wale (v. Bliss של‎ 1% 2% trabny adj.gent. (noun not found); Je 29"; also v3! (where van d. H. dm) 41 נַחלֶת‎ +. adn. 1 | [נחם]+‎ vb. Niph. be sorry, console oneself, etc. (only in der. species) (NH Pi. com: fort; Ph.in n.pr.Lzb*”; Y Pa.=NH, and deriy.; Chr Pal Aram. Pa. 20., Schwally**™; Ar, breathe pantingly (of horse)) ;-- 8 iph. P Am +*ץ‎ 4 t.; O92) Je 20%+2t.; 15. Gn 6' + 8 t.; "MN Ze 8%; 2 mpl. נְחַמְתֶּם‎ 142; Impf. 003. Ex 137+6 t.; Of3% Gu +6t.; +5t. Impf.; Jmv. O73 Ex 32” 9 Inf.0737 Je 31% 1815”; Pe. Of] Ju 21° + on)

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He ought to leave. Then he hears a sound he cannot place, an unfamiliar engine note, and yes, there , this is it, this is the moment he has dreamed of. He stares into the sky. He sees the landing lights of . . . he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what it is . It is not in any of the books. He takes its picture. He copies its registration number onto the page. It is a visitation from the future: a new American Air Force plane. To the boy plane-spotter of the 1950s, it is like seeing the Holy Grail . When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black. A hand fell on his shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Come with me, laddie.’ They frogmarched him to the guardhouse, pushed him through the door, and there, behind a desk, a sergeant-major type with a moustache and a frown stood up, barked at him, ripped the page out of his notebook, screwed it into a ball and threw it in the bin, shouted some more, took the back off the camera, exposed the roll of film, pulled it out in loops of falling acetate and dumped that in the bin too. I was crying my eyes out , Dad said. They said, ‘Go home. You didn’t see anything. Forget you were here.’ And they dumped me back at the perimeter and I stood there with my notebook and the Brownie, sobbing away. But then I stopped crying, because I’d thought of something. Something out of Dick Barton or the Eagle. Maybe I’d written hard enough . Using his pencil, he shaded the page of his notebook with graphite, and there, white on grey, impressed on the paper from the missing page above, was the registration number of the secret plane. He stopped crying, he said, and cycled home in triumph. I sat down, dazed. Sun through windows. Things, one after another. The achingly beautiful singing of the choir. The canon’s prayers. Eulogies praising my father’s photographic skills. When Alastair Campbell walked to the lectern he read Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ and prefaced it with a short speech in which he said, with decided emphasis, that my father was a Good Man. This broke me. I hadn’t expected this. Or not this much this. Everyone sang ‘Jerusalem’ and I forced my mouth to move, but nothing came out but whispered fragments. And afterwards, out in the shaded churchyard under the trees, a young guy with misted glasses and a purple knitted cardigan walked up, shying nervously, and said, ‘You don’t know me. I don’t know anyone in there. They’re all the big guns. But I wanted to say that . . . well. I’m a photographer now. I’m making a living out of it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  You learn. Today, I thought, not nine years old and not bored, I was patient and the hawks came. I got up slowly, legs a little numb from so long motionless, and found I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won’t die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff. I weighed the little twiggy sphere in my hand. Hardly there at all. And on a sudden impulse, I stowed this little stolen memento of the time I saw the hawks in my inside jacket pocket and went home. I put it on a shelf near the phone. Three weeks later, it was the reindeer moss I was looking at when my mother called and told me my father was dead. 2 Lost I was about to leave the house when the phone rang. I picked it up. Hop-skippity, doorkeys in my hand. ‘Hello?’ A pause. My mother. She only had to say one sentence. It was this: ‘I had a phone call from St Thomas’ Hospital.’ Then I knew. I knew that my father had died. I knew he was dead because that was the sentence she said after the pause and she used a voice I’d never heard before to say it. Dead. I was on the floor. My legs broke, buckled, and I was sitting on the carpet, phone pressed against my right ear, listening to my mother and staring at that little ball of reindeer moss on the bookshelf, impossibly light, a buoyant tangle of hard grey stems with sharp, dusty tips and quiet spaces that were air in between them and Mum was saying there was nothing they could do at the hospital, it was his heart, I think, nothing could be done, you don’t have to come back tonight, don’t come back, it’s a long way, and it’s late, and it’s such a long drive and you don’t need to come back – and of course this was nonsense; neither of us knew what the hell could or should be done or what this was except both of us and my brother, too, all of us were clinging to a world already gone.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren. We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart. I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book—less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her. INTRODUCTION [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] I ORIGINALLY INTENDED A VERY different book. The opportunity to write it first arose while I was still in law school, after my election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, a legal periodical largely unknown outside the profession. A burst of publicity followed that election, including several newspaper articles that testified less to my modest accomplishments than to Harvard Law School’s peculiar place in the American mythology, as well as America’s hunger for any optimistic sign from the racial front—a morsel of proof that, after all, some progress has been made. A few publishers called, and I, imagining myself to have something original to say about the current state of race relations, agreed to take off a year after graduation and put my thoughts to paper.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  And I’m determined to stick around to find out what that extension involves.” The Gifts We Didn’t Ask For C. S. Lewis wrote, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust ? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”13 Maybe it’s just coincidence, but here’s something I’ve observed: the most grateful people I’ve known are those who have suffered the most. Now, this isn’t a recommendation for us to go seek out suffering just so we can top the grateful-people chart. But it is a plea for us to think carefully about how we respond to our boring, mundane jobs or the darkest moments of our lives. We don’t have to like our circumstances, but we can choose to look for the unexpected gifts they may bring. When Zac was in the depth of his depression, I remember not liking God’s plans. When I sat speechless with my sister, knowing that nothing I said would ease her pain, I remember not liking God’s plans. When Caroline cried the last night of Christmas vacation because she just couldn’t muster the energy to deal with dyslexia at school the following day, I remember not liking God’s plans. When my darling friend and colleague Hannah felt leveled by so much lack in life—the lack of a boyfriend, the lack of a mentor, the lack of a friendship group, the lack of a reliable car—I didn’t like God’s plans at all. When loved ones have wrestled with broken marriages and broken promises, with diagnoses and despair, with layoffs at work and lethargy in motherhood, with aging parents and angsty preteens, God’s plans haven’t felt especially benevolent. In those moments life feels cruel at best. And yet. Didn’t Zac and I know God more intimately because of our difficulties? Didn’t Katie carve out new capacity for believing God, on her knees on those dark, dark days? Hasn’t Caroline learned to let people help her, because without help she just can’t succeed?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He never finished a show without calling into a public-house on his way home; and on the night of our party he had been drinking at Fulham. Here, all hidden in a corner stall, he had overheard a fellow at the bar say that Gully Sutherland was past his best, and should make way for funnier artistes; that he had sat through Gully’s latest routine, and all the gags were flat ones. The bar-man said that when Gully heard this he went to the man and shook him by the hand, and bought him a beer, then he bought beer for everyone. Then he went home and took a gun, and fired it at his own heart ...We didn’t know all of this that night at Marylebone, we knew only that Gully had had a kind of fit, and taken his life; but the news put an end to our party and left us all, like Esther, nervous and grave. Kitty and I, on hearing the news, went up to the stage - she seizing my hand as we stumbled up the steps, but in grief now, I thought, rather than anything warmer. The manager had had all the house-lights lit, and the band had lain their instruments aside; some people were weeping, the cornet-player who had tickled me had his arm about a trembling girl. Esther cried, ‘Oh isn’t it awful, isn’t it horrible?’ - I suppose the wine made everybody feel the shock of it the more.I, however, did not know what to make of it. I couldn’t think of Gully at all: my thoughts were still with Kitty, and with that moment in the change-room, when I had felt her hand on me and seemed to feel a kind of understanding leap between us. She hadn’t looked at me since then, and now she had gone to talk to one of the boys who had brought the news of Gully’s suicide. After a moment, however, I saw her shake her head and step away, and seem to search for me; and when she saw me - waiting for her, in the shadows of the wing - she came and sighed. ‘Poor Gully. They say his heart was shot right through...’‘And to think,’ I said, ‘it was for Gully’s sake that I first went to Canterbury and saw you ...’She looked at me, then, and trembled; and put a hand to her cheek, as if made weak with sorrow. But I dared not move to comfort her - only stood, miserable and unsure.When I said that we should go - since other people were now leaving - she nodded.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  Na 1° Now (after Bi) NUM) (rd. NYA? (שאה//‎ ; 89" rd. שָאין‎ Bi Ri Che; Hb 1° SW queried by We Gr Buhl al., cf. Gunkel Sbeptrs °3, 2. Bear, carry: a. lit., a load or burden (usu. acc.) Gn 37” 447 (both J), 45% (E), 18 to? Je לסז‎ 177" + very oft.; נשא בָלִים‎ armour-bearer גו‎ 1 ₪ 14' + 016. ₪5 ; bearing weapons 1 09 = 12% 2 00 1477; La 3” ג' על)‎ fig.), Is1™ (fig., cf. 6 infr.); a load of care, responsibility Dt 1°"; share a burden with “nS נ'‎ Ex 18” (E; no acc.); with יִשָא ,ב'‎ בְשִיחִי מִשָבָּבִי‎ Ib 7" my bed shall carry at (help carry) my grief, Nuri”; take up and carry (idolatrous images) Am 5° Is 46’; bear ephod, 1 ₪5 2% 145+v’s (G), 22% (v. Dr in Hastings Dict.725) - in triumph 15 8% b. esp. bear guilt, or punishment Gn 4" (J, ‘2Y), oft. Ez HP: +H ג'‎ Ly set 738 Nu et TAs “ch "סד‎ (all By Ly 17" 19° 20 (H) Ez14” 44” (cf. Hiph. Lv 22); SOM נ'‎ Ly 20% 24% (H) Nu g*(P), cf. Ez 23"; cf. md3 “316°, WI) Pr ro}, כ‎ abs. 9”; +++ כ' עון‎ = 6 responsible for Ex 28" Nu 18" cf. לט‎ ; =bear guilt for others Lv10” 16” (of goat ; אֶלהארץ-+‎ estr. praegn.), Nu 30" (all ne), B74 "5-5, cf. זְנוּתִיכֶם‎ ‘5 Nu 1 SDN 15 Is Bol? ef. adn ;יצ כ'‎ also +++ כ' בע‎ bear at (share in), Ez 18%, ¢, support, sustain, on (על)‎ wings Ex 10* Dt 32" ץ‎ 91 (all fig.); land could not support them Gn 13°(J), 367 ¢P). d. endure Je 15% 31 Ez 36° Jb34” 55" 69° 88 Pr 18% 307; suffer, bear with, permit Jb 21°. e. bear, carry, DION 2B מָאֶת‎ Sb Gn 43° (J) and they (indef.) carried portions from his presence unto them; carry gifts as tribute 2 0 87°; later, bring an offering y 96° = 1 0 16”, Ez 20% (G Co ;בראשית‎ Toy foll. MT). | = carry =contain, hold: bath to hold to homer Ez45". g. bear fruit, of tree Hg 2" Jo 2”, fig. Ez 36°; boughs 17% (in fig.); produce, yield, of mountains Jb 40” 72° (both 8. > Sor). 3. Take, take away: a. lit. c. מן‎ 1S 17% Nu 16” (unjustly). b. take away, carry off, emer 1K 15"—> Ch 76°, 1 K 18" a s™ Mi 2? Je 49” (5 pers.), Is 40% 41+; take away head er pers.) Gn 40” (v. supr.); sweep away = destroy Jb 32” (cf. Niph. 4); lite 2814". c. take away, guilt, iniquity, trans- gression, etc., i.e. forgive, c. acc. Gn 50” (E), ‘Ex 32” (E), "סז‎ 34’ (J), טוא‎ 4% (JE), 8 15° Ho 14° Jb 7™ )|| NY ל + ;32° ץ ,(הָעָבִיר‎ 671

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  My mother. She only had to say one sentence. It was this: ‘I had a phone call from St Thomas’ Hospital.’ Then I knew. I knew that my father had died. I knew he was dead because that was the sentence she said after the pause and she used a voice I’d never heard before to say it. Dead. I was on the floor. My legs broke, buckled, and I was sitting on the carpet, phone pressed against my right ear, listening to my mother and staring at that little ball of reindeer moss on the bookshelf, impossibly light, a buoyant tangle of hard grey stems with sharp, dusty tips and quiet spaces that were air in between them and Mum was saying there was nothing they could do at the hospital, it was his heart, I think, nothing could be done, you don’t have to come back tonight, don’t come back, it’s a long way, and it’s late, and it’s such a long drive and you don’t need to come back – and of course this was nonsense; neither of us knew what the hell could or should be done or what this was except both of us and my brother, too, all of us were clinging to a world already gone. I put down the phone. The keys were still in my hand. In that world already gone I was going for dinner with Christina, my Australian philosopher friend, who’d been there all along, sitting on the sofa when the phone rang. Her white face stared at me. I told her what had happened. And insisted we still go to the restaurant because we’d booked a table, of course we should go, and we did go, and we ordered, and the food came and I didn’t eat it. The waiter was upset, wanted to know if anything was wrong. Well. I think Christina told him. I can’t remember her doing so, but he did something quite extraordinary. He disappeared, then reappeared at the table with an expression of anxious concern, and a double chocolate brownie with ice-cream and a sprig of mint stuck in the top, on the house, dusted with cocoa powder and icing sugar. On a black plate. I stared at it. That is ridiculous, I thought. Then, What is it? I pulled the mint out of the ice-cream, held it up, looked at its two small leaves and its tiny cut stem smeared with chocolate, and thought, This isn’t going to grow again. Touched and bewildered that a waiter had thought that free cake and ice-cream would comfort me, I looked at the cut end of the mint. It reminded me of something. I groped for what it could be.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I looked up at the thing that was like a door but had no walls behind it. ‘Is it a house, Daddy?’ I asked him. ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s very, very old.’ I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient , he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love. I tucked the card back into the bookshelf. ‘Love you too, Dad,’ I whispered. 25 Magical places Ten days have passed. Last night the forecast was bad. A storm surge threatened to inundate East Anglia. All night I kept waking, listening to the rain, fearing for the caravans along the coast, their frail silver backs against the rain and rising seas. But the storm surge held back at the brink, and the morning dawned blue and shiny as a puddle. After lunch I take Mabel up to the hill. Fractious gusts of wind rattle the hedgerows, blowing voluminous shoals of leaves over us as we walk up the track. There’s sticky mud, and pheasant prints in it. Flocks of fieldfares chak chak and dodge in the hawthorns by the cow field, breaking low when we get too near, bouncing over the hedge and away in thrushy strobes of black and white. It’s nice to see them. Proper winter is here. And Mabel is fizzing with happiness, wagging her tail in barely suppressed excitement, tummy feathers fluffed over her grippy toes, eyes gleaming silver in the sun. If this hawk could speak, she’d be singing under her breath. Something has changed inside me. Today it’s hard to slip into the exquisite, wordless sharpness of being a hawk. Or rather , the hawk seems more human today. A rabbit lopes across the path twenty yards away and she chases it; swings up into a poplar , clutching onto a thin, near-vertical branch and leaning into the wind, narrow as a stoat. She looks about. Sees something. Goes to the next tree, looks down. Then flies back to the first one. I proffer my fist. She comes down immediately, and off we go again. Raah , she says. More . By the hayrolls we sneak through the side of the wood, and then make our way to the corner of the top field. I’m a little blurry. I’ve combated the drug-induced tiredness with two double espressos at breakfast and a caffeinated soda after lunch.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The Victorian terrace loomed and swayed in the summer dusk. I walked to my door, box in my arms. I don’t remember opening the box that night. What I remember is my bare feet treading on carpet and the weight of the hawk on my fist. Her shape, long and haunted, and the hitch of her nervous shoulders as she stepped backwards onto the shadow of the bowperch on my living-room floor. I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, ‘reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost’. Yes, holding the hawk for the first time felt like that. Exactly like that. Mutely I crawled up the stairs and fell into bed. The hawk was here, the journey was over. That night I dreamed of my father. It wasn’t the usual dream of a family reunited. In the dream I’m searching for something in a house, an empty house with pale squares on the walls where pictures should be. I can’t find what I am looking for. I open an upstairs door onto a room that is not like the others. Three white walls run with water and the far wall is gone. No wall at all: just air, falling into the pale violet of a city evening. Below me is a bombsite. Tons of bricks and rubble, rosebay willowherb blooming in drifts between broken rafters and spars that are ruined chairs and the shadows between all these things are thickening to night. But they are not what I am looking at. Because standing on top of the tallest pile of bricks is a small boy with sandy hair. His face is turned away, but I recognise him immediately, and not just because he’s wearing the same short trousers and lumpy grey jacket in a photograph in our family album. It is my father. As soon as I see him I know where I am. This is Shepherd’s Bush, where he’d run wild as a boy, clambering over bombsites with his friends, collecting things, salvaging them, hiding, watching. ‘We used to bomb bricks with bombs made of bricks,’ he’d told me once. ‘There wasn’t much else to play with.’ And then the boy turns, looks up at me standing in the ruined house, and I know he is going to say something. But there are no words. Instead, he points with one arm. Points up. I look. There’s an aeroplane up there, thousands of feet above us, so high its fuselage and wings are still lit by the setting sun. There’s no engine noise, no sound, nothing moving anywhere else. Just this small point of light crossing the sky until it passes over and is lost in the shadow of the world. And I look down again, and the boy that was my father is gone. 7 Invisibility

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But I hadn’t trained a hawk then, and I had no understanding of loss. I did not know how White felt. Now I did. I sat on my bed and it pressed on my chest like a weight the size of a hill. I felt it. For the first time I understood that vast blankness that shuttered his heart in horror. ‘I cannot remember that my heart stopped beating at any particular time,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The blow was so stunning, so final after six weeks of unremitting faith, that it was tempered to me as being beyond my appreciation. Death will be like this, something too vast to hurt much or perhaps even to upset me.’ His heart is torn in half. The pigeon in his hand is rigid with terror; it has turned from a bird to a thing of iron and feathers. Its red eye is blank, its little beak panting. He steels himself and throws it high in the air towards the hawk in the tree. The pigeon he’d bought to trap the hawks in the wood – such irony – rises up, trailing the creance behind it. Gos stoops upon it like a vast predatory butterfly, but then pulls away and swings into the next tree. White pulls the pigeon to earth, picks it up, follows, and throws it out again. He fishes for Gos with the pigeon as a fisherman casts lures for a pike. He has been doing this for a while now, and each time the hawk’s stoop brings it closer to the pigeon and White’s waiting hands. He bends to pick the pigeon from the ground, exhausted, wings spread, its flight feathers so wet they look like fraying pencils. He knows this terrified bird can barely fly. He knows that the next time he throws it into the air the hawk will catch it. Just one more time. But he cannot do it. He knows this pigeon. He had tamed it. It had sat companionably on his finger. It was his friend. His world is broken; he is breaking his Word. It is brute cruelty. He cannot do this any more. He remembers a passage in Blaine’s book on capturing hawks while they sleep, hugs the soaking pigeon to his breast and leaves Gos to nightfall. He returns with a ladder, a rope, a torch and the salmon rod he’d used once before to hook Gos down from a tree. He stands under the tree, trembling with hope of success, when Graham Wheeler, the farmer’s lad who had come to help, runs up. Gos takes fright and slips from the tree into darkness.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  The woman’s name was Roddy, and the two of them hit it off. Dee and Roddy were best friends and teammates for forty-eight years of marriage. I met Roddy three months after Dee passed away from ALS. She graciously let me interview her during a women’s ministry event, a conversation that stays with me still. “I noticed Dee was slurring his words one morning at breakfast,” Roddy explained to the three hundred women sitting before her. “I knew something was amiss.” Within twelve months, a man who had been expressive and vibrant, confident and active, lay motionless, speechless, and terribly gaunt in a recumbent wheelchair at home. “Talking” involved laboriously tapping out letters with a pen held by two fingers, one slow keystroke at a time. Rolling over in bed was an impossible feat. Getting dressed on his own? That was out too. “Was I happy about this?” Roddy said. “The answer is no. ” ALS, which stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a nervous-system disease that progressively weakens muscles until there is no physical strength left at all. It’s extremely rare, and it is incurable. Life expectancy from time of diagnosis is a meager two to five years. “He lived for two and a half years after we found out he had ALS,” Roddy said. “And then Dee was gone.” I asked whether she’d been mad at God at any point, given the tragedy she’d endured. The concept was so foreign to her that she seemed offended I’d even ask. “Mad at God?” she said. “You know, we never once asked ‘Why?’ If anything, we asked ‘Why not ?’ ” Roddy said their faith in Jesus assured them that God would use even Dee’s disease and eventual death for good. And God has used it. And God still is using it. At the time of Dee’s diagnosis, he and Roddy had been serving in our church’s marriage ministry for a decade. Even after Dee was confined to a wheelchair and incapable of vocalizing his thoughts, he showed up at ministry meetings and events, determined to keep sharing his faith, tapping out the letters on his text-to-voice simulator: Tap, tap, tap. “Jesus came to earth.” Tap, tap, tap. “He died for our sins.” Tap, tap, tap. “He rose again.” Tap, tap, tap. “And He is seated at the right hand of the Father.” Tap, tap, tap. “As long as I have breath”—tap, tap, tap —“I will tell that good news.” I looked at Roddy as she talked to our group that night, admiring her steadiness and her candor, and I realized that part of the good that God had worked together involved us, there that night. There was hardly a dry eye in the room as women absorbed the weight of Roddy’s story. “I still don’t fully accept that Dee is gone, never to come back,” she said. “But this much I do know: his death was not an ending but an extension.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  It doesn’t mean you’re an ignorant citizen of the world or that you’re avoiding reality if you don’t watch or read about current events for hours a day. You can still stay aware without soaking up so much toxicity constantly. When you’ve integrated acceptance, you know that tragedy exists. You acknowledge that fact. You’re not constantly on the lookout for the possibility of loss because you know it’s a reality. However, you also don’t drown yourself in distressing news because you know that you can handle pain and discomfort if and when you have to. Instead of doubting your ability to endure (and hence the need for your ever- present anxiety), you can begin trusting that you can cope with whatever comes. You can handle pain. It’s not pleasant—not by any means. But you also trust that you can find a way through. If you’ve never experienced loss, you may be wondering how one simply trusts that they will survive through pain. That is one of the side effects of grief: you learn that even when your worst nightmares come true, the darkest night does not last forever. Sam saw this firsthand. They told me how they used to worry all the time about their home burning down, especially since it was on a hillside and they’d had more and more close calls through the years. They used to lose sleep worrying about what it would be like someday if their home went up in flames. They thought they would never be able to get through it. And then, one day their worst fear came true. It actually happened. While Sam was shattered by the loss of their home, they also told me over the next several months that the reality of the pain was not nearly as intense as what they had imagined. While they were heartbroken, they were learning how to pick up the pieces. Were they a changed person? Absolutely. But through their tragedy they also saw how much other people cared about them, in a way they had never known before. They had an opportunity to evaluate what really mattered to them moving forward in their new beginning. They never would have wished to have lived through such devastation, but alas . . . here they were—living and breathing through it one day at a time. And I have to say this because I know you’re thinking it. But what if I don’t make it? What if it is too much? What if I die of the pain? This goes against everything in our paradigm of anti-death but here goes: so be it. Death happens sometimes. It’s usually not what we want but it is a part of life.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They nested nearby, and that July afternoon we were hoping for the kind of sighting they’d sometimes give us: a submarine ripple through the tops of the pines as one swept in and away; a glimpse of a yellow eye; a barred chest against moving needles, or a quick silhouette stamped black against the Surrey sky. For a while it had been exciting to stare into the darkness between the trees and the bloodorange and black where the sun slapped crazy-paving shadows across pines. But when you are nine, waiting is hard. I kicked at the base of the fence with my wellingtoned feet. Squirmed and fidgeted. Let out a sigh. Hung off the fence with my fingers. And then my dad looked at me, half exasperated, half amused, and explained something. He explained patience . He said it was the most important thing of all to remember, this: that when you wanted to see something very badly, sometimes you had to stay still, stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it, and be patient. ‘When I’m at work, taking photographs for the paper,’ he said, ‘sometimes I’ve got to sit in the car for hours to get the picture I want. I can’t get up to get a cup of tea or even go to the loo. I just have to be patient. If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.’ He was grave and serious, not annoyed; what he was doing was communicating a grown-up Truth, but I nodded sulkily and stared at the ground. It sounded like a lecture, not advice, and I didn’t understand the point of what he was trying to say. You learn. Today , I thought, not nine years old and not bored, I was patient and the hawks came . I got up slowly, legs a little numb from so long motionless, and found I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won’t die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Impressive stuff. I weighed the little twiggy sphere in my hand. Hardly there at all. And on a sudden impulse, I stowed this little stolen memento of the time I saw the hawks in my inside jacket pocket and went home. I put it on a shelf near the phone. Three weeks later , it was the reindeer moss I was looking at when my mother called and told me my father was dead. 2 Lost I was about to leave the house when the phone rang. I picked it up. Hop-skippity, doorkeys in my hand. ‘Hello?’ A pause. My mother.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Are you disappointed? That’s all that’s required to get yourself a golden ticket to the gates of grief. No one wants to go there, but there aren’t VIP passes that warrant which rides you get to go on. You don’t need to compare your grief to others. It is what it is. There’s no one who can take away how you feel—and that includes how you treat yourself. I try to model this for my clients. I’ll never hide what I’m going through if it’s going to potentially impact how I show up in session. It’s important to me that my clients know that I’m a real human being, just like they are. As I would hope they could set boundaries if they needed a break, I want to show that for them as well. I’m reminded of when I had to take some time off when I almost lost Mochi. He hadn’t even turned five yet and he had been gradually and unexplainably losing weight for months. Things took a turn when he was coming out of anesthesia after getting an ultrasound. We found out Mochi was in sepsis and the vet told me he had a 50 percent chance of making it. The vet told us that she would call us during the night if Mochi didn’t survive. I’ve never been so afraid for the phone to ring. Thankfully, the phone didn’t ring that night, but Mochi went through a harrowing few weeks to recover (he even had a feeding tube). I can honestly tell you that I’ve never been so upset in my life. I remember sobbing for days on end. I even ordered a stuffed-animal Siamese cat off Amazon just so that I’d have something to hold. I saved his tufts of fur that he left around the house (yep, I was that upset). Even though he didn’t die, I was still wracked with the shock and anguish of almost losing him. During that time, there was no way that I could be present for my clients. I could have tried to push past and ignore the pain, but it would have been a disservice to my clients and to myself. I had two priorities during that time: to help Mochi heal and to make room for my own emotional pain. By the grace of God (and an incredible vet staff with modern medicine), Mochi recovered. I’ll always remember how, when we finally got to take him home, he picked up his head and started purring the loudest we’d ever heard. He was just as excited as we were that he finally got to go home.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  You may have felt like a prisoner to your anxiety, but don’t forget—you also hold the keys that can release you from the pain. Now it’s time to pick them up and see which ones work. A NEW WAVE TO RIDE: What are some steps that you’d like to take toward your wellness to grow mentally, physically, and emotionally this upcoming week? With sustained effort, how do you think you might feel differently in a month, six months, or a year from now? CHAPTER TEN WHEN YOUR SURFBOARD BREAKS Things started out fairly routine with Sam. They wanted to discuss their recent breakup with a partner. As a queer, nonbinary, white, atheist person, they had been to therapy before and had a positive association with it. They considered this a “tune-up” to process their new relationship status. While they were disappointed that the relationship didn’t work out, they weren’t distraught. They were simply giving themselves space to reflect and feel. You go, Glen Coco. But then, things changed. Overnight. Sam came to their session in tears. I’d seen them upset—but this was next level. I said, “Sam, what’s going on? I can tell something is wrong.” They answered, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this . . . but my family home burned down last week.” “What?” I was shocked. “Yes. A fire blew through town so quickly. The winds were wild. One minute we were told to evacuate and the next we were driving up to see our house in ashes. I just can’t believe it.” I responded, “Sam, this is truly awful. I am so, so sorry.” We sat together while they cried. Nowhere to be but here. Sam eventually said, “This just can’t be real. I have so many memories in that house. Christmas Eve dinners. Birthday parties. Getting a puppy and playing with him in the backyard. To know that it’s all gone is devastating. I can’t accept it.” My heart ached for Sam. While I hadn’t lived out their pain directly, I had felt something close. Being a California psychologist, I’ve had many clients experience the trauma of ravaging fires, and it’s hit close to my own childhood home. While my family narrowly escaped having our home burn down by the Thomas fire in 2017, my best friend, also named Lauren, lost her family home that day—on her birthday. I’ll never forget hearing her tell me while I sat on a plane, “It’s all gone, Lauren. My home is gone.” All of our childhood memories flashed before my eyes: building forts in the backyard, playing with Barbie dolls in her playroom, and dressing up for Halloween in July (we always took months to plan out our outfits in advance and still do to this day). When she told me the news, I immediately started crying on the plane. I didn’t care that people saw. Her home was gone and there was no getting it back.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Don’t stop yourself from writing because you’re afraid of tears flowing or anger swelling. Let it bubble up to the surface for you and breathe into it. Set aside some time in a safe space to say what you wish your younger self could have heard at that time. If it feels hard to get started, here are some prompts to guide you through: • When is a time in your life that you remember feeling scared, in pain, or confused? • What do you wish you could have told your inner child in those moments when you were anxious or hurting? • If you felt abandoned or life felt out of control, what do you wish could have been done differently? How would you make a choice now as an adult to protect that younger version of yourself? If you feel inspired to continue healing your inner child, there are so many ways to get in touch with the younger self that still lives inside of us. Many of us cut ourselves off from that version of ourselves—we block off memories, things we loved at the time, and that childlike sense of curiosity and play because the vulnerability feels too great. While we can’t change the past, we can begin having corrective experiences in a safe way where we learn to re-love what brought us joy or heal what brought us pain. What’s different is that we can parent ourselves—this time in the way that we wish it would have been done. Unlike in childhood, where we have so little control much of the time (let’s be honest—we’re often at the mercy of the adults around us), as adults we have more power to choose the outcome and resolve our narrative. Here are some ways to reconnect and restore your inner child: • Look back on pictures from your childhood. Think about or write a message of healing to the child you see looking back at you. Frame it and put it up as a reminder of your dedication to taking care of that child within. • Join an intramural sport, take a dance class, or do another physical activity that you enjoyed as a child. Get back into that state of play. Perhaps if that activity became excessively competitive or a source of pain, you can repair that relationship with a new experience of it, particularly without any parental or coaching pressure. • Do some artwork. As children, many of us painted, drew, colored, or sculpted.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He hesitated ; I kicked at his ankle with my foot until he stepped away.‘You are not yourself, Nan -’‘Get out!’‘I am afraid to leave you -’‘Get out!’He flinched. ‘I shall go beyond the door - no further.’ Then he looked at Kitty, and when she nodded he left, closing the door behind him very gently.There was a silence, broken only by the sound of my ragged breathing, and Kitty’s gentle weeping: just so had I seen my sister weep, three days before. Nothing that Kitty ever did was good! she had said. I placed my cheek upon the counterpane where it covered Kitty’s thighs, and closed my eyes.‘You made me think he was your friend,’ I said. ‘And then you made me think he didn’t care for you, because of us.’‘I didn’t know what else to do. He was only my friend; and then, and then-’‘To think of you and him - for all that time -’‘It wasn’t what you think, before last night.’‘I don’t believe you.’‘Oh Nan, it’s true, I swear! Before last night - how could there have been anything? - before last night, there was only talk and - kisses.’Before last night ... Before last night I had been glad, beloved, content, secure: before last night I had known myself so full of love and desire I thought I should die of it! At Kitty’s words I saw that the pain of my love was not a tenth, not a hundredth, not a thousandth part of the pain I should suffer, at her hands, now.I opened my eyes. Kitty herself looked ill and frightened. I said, ‘And the - kisses: when did they start?’ But even as I asked it, I guessed the answer: ‘That night, at Deacon’s ...’She hesitated - then nodded; and I saw it all again, and understood it all: the awkwardness, the silences, the letters. I had pitied Walter - pitied him! When all the time it had been I who was the fool; when all the time they had been meeting, whispering together, caressing ...The thought was a torment to me. Walter was our friend - mine, as well as hers. I knew he loved her, but - he seemed so old, so uncle-ish, still. Could she ever, really, have brought herself to want to lie with him? It was as if I had caught her in bed with my own father!I began, once more, to weep. ‘How could you?’ I said through my tears: I sounded like a stage husband in some penny gaff. ‘How could you?’ Beneath the blankets I felt her squirm.‘I didn’t like to do it!’ she said miserably. ‘At times I could hardly bear it -’‘I thought you loved me! You said that you loved me!’‘I do love you!

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

  They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide. Umayyads permitted some of the old Arab informality, but they understood the importance of the monarch’s state of exception. They modeled their court ceremonial on Persian practice, shrouded the caliph from public view in the mosque, and achieved a monopoly of state violence by ruling that only the caliph could summon Muslims to war. 69 But this adoption of the systemic violence condemned by the Quran was very disturbing to the more devout Muslims, and nearly all the institutions now regarded as critical to Islam emerged from anguished discussions that took place after the civil war. One was the Sunni/Shiah divide. Another was the discipline of jurisprudence ( fiqh ): jurists wanted to establish precise legal norms that would make the Quranic command to build a just society a real possibility rather than a pious dream. These debates also produced Islamic historiography: in order to find solutions in the present, Muslims looked back to the time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs ( rashidun ). Moreover, Muslim asceticism developed as a reaction against the growing luxury and worldliness of the aristocracy. Ascetics often wore the coarse woollen garments ( tasawwuf ) standard among the poor, as the Prophet had done, so would become known as Sufis. While the caliph and his administration struggled with the problems that beset any agrarian empire and tried to develop a powerful monarchy, these pious Muslims were adamantly opposed to any compromise with its structural inequity and oppression. One event above all others symbolized the tragic conflict between the inherent violence of the state and Muslim ideals. After Ali’s death, the Shii had pinned their hopes on Ali’s descendants. Hasan, Ali’s elder son, came to an agreement with Muawiyyah and retired from political life. But in 680, when Muawiyyah died, he passed the caliphate to his son Yazid. For the first time, a Muslim ruler had not been elected by his peers, and there were Shii demonstrations in Kufa in favor of Husain, Ali’s younger son. This uprising was ruthlessly quashed, but Husain had already set out from Medina to Kufa, accompanied by a small band of his followers and their wives and children, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching to end imperial injustice would remind the ummah of its Islamic priorities. But Yazid sent out the army, and they were massacred on the plain of Karbala, outside Kufa; Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms. All Muslims lament the murder of the Prophet’s grandson, but for the Shiah, Karbala epitomized the Muslim dilemma. How could Islamic justice be realistically implemented in a belligerent imperial state? Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r.