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.

Page 246 of 263 · 20 per page

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Today I welcome all of you and ask that you bow your heads in remembrance of those we lost, both on the ground and from the air. One hundred sixteen died in that fifty-eight-day period, senselessly, needlessly, randomly. It could have been any of us.” Already, Miri feels herself choking up. Three clergymen take turns reading out the names of the dead, beginning with the first crash. Miri waits for the familiar names. Ruby Granik, twenty-two, Estelle Sapphire, fifty-nine. Then the second crash. Kathy Stein, eighteen. Penny Foster, seven. She lets out a small, unexpected cry when Penny’s name is read. Henry reaches for her hand. Christina passes her a packet of Kleenex. She wipes her eyes, glad she didn’t use mascara, and blows her nose. When all the names have been read, a children’s chorus sings a medley—“April Showers,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “Keep on Smiling.” Someone with style has orchestrated this day of events. After, they form a circle and toss flowers into the center. Most of them have daffodils or tulips but Miri special-ordered a dozen sunflowers through a local florist. Penny loved sunflowers, was always drawing pictures of the sunflowers in the print hanging over her family’s fireplace. Then they join hands and close their eyes for a silent prayer. The ceremony lasts just half an hour. Their personal remarks are to be saved for the luncheon to follow at the Elizabeth Carteret hotel. The mayor makes an announcement that the lunch will be hosted by Natalie Renso, who will be signing books following the program. Miri looks around the circle but can’t find Natalie. She thought Natalie might show up to honor Ruby. Instead, she spots Gaby Wenders, the stewardess, in her old uniform. She must be in good shape, Miri thinks, to fit into that uniform thirty-five years later. And next to Gaby, the boy who rescued her, the boy who saved her life. Miri half expects to see the boy he was then. The boy she loved. Instead, she sees a grown man. Still, her knees grow weak. For god’s sake, she thinks, trying to remember what her yoga teacher has taught her about breathing in stressful situations. He makes the first move, walking briskly across the field to where she is standing. “Miri,” he says. “Jesus …Miri…” He wraps his arms around her. Now she can’t breathe at all. When he lets go, she pushes her sunglasses up so she can get a look at him. Did she hope he wouldn’t be attractive? He grabs her hand. “I’m so glad to see you.” “I’m glad to see you, too.” The voice that comes out doesn’t sound like hers. “Can I give you a ride to the lunch?” he asks. Christina and Jack have a car, so do Henry and Leah, but Miri says, “Sure,” and walks with Mason around the block to his red Mazda RX-7. She almost laughs because Andy drives the same car.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  She’d thought of calling casual acquaintances and asking them to check on him, but he was closer with the nurses than with random old neighbors, and these nurses knew what they were doing; they’d held hands for hours with many men dying alone. Besides which, Fiona just needed to recover and then she could get back down there to the third floor, take care of him again. But meanwhile Yale fell into deep unconsciousness, and Fiona had to make the medical decisions over the phone, the maternity nurses looking on with concern. She’d send Damian down again and again with messages for Yale, despite the fact that he likely couldn’t hear a thing, and when he came back up she’d make him tell her what Yale looked like. “He’s got so many tubes coming out of him,” he said. “He’s the wrong color. Fiona, I don’t know. I’m so tired. I’ll go back again if you need, but every time I’m in there I think I’ll pass out.” Yale’s old friend Gloria and her girlfriend did some shifts, but only in the afternoons. When Nico had died, there were too many people wanting to be in the room, jockeying for position, vying for the roles of caretaker and hand-holder and chief mourner. And now there was no one. Yale had been there for Nico, and Terrence, and even fucking Charlie, and there was no one left for him, not really, and it killed her. Claire was thirty-six hours old and nursing wasn’t working, and Fiona, who’d been prepared for the tearing of a natural birth, was in disbelief at the howling pain that ran through her entire body when she tried to adjust her torso, tried to sit up on her own just the slightest bit. She’d go light-headed and collapse back, blind. In the five minutes the Lamaze instructor had devoted to C-sections, she’d never mentioned the pain, the crippling. Fiona made it to the bathroom on the arm of the nurse, and nearly fainted. She asked if they could take her down to the AIDS unit in a wheelchair, and the first nurse said she’d have to ask the doctor, but then she never came back. The second nurse said it could be done in the morning. Fiona might have fought harder, but the pain was too much, and the drugs were closing her eyes, and in the morning everything would be easier. Claire stayed in the nursery all night that night, and Fiona slept late. She woke to Dr. Cheng’s face. He’d come all the way upstairs. When his expression came into focus she screamed so primally, so loudly, that if she’d been anywhere other than a maternity ward, everyone would have come running. It was early this morning, Dr. Cheng said. Debbie the charge nurse had been with him. But that wasn’t enough. And if Fiona hadn’t sent his mother away, he might have heard her voice through the haze.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  I have opportunities now to point people toward both fictional and nonfictional accounts of the AIDS crisis. This book is about a lot more than AIDS—it’s also about the Paris art world of the 1920s, cults, Chicago, memory, and loss. I do want people to come away knowing, thinking, or feeling more about AIDS than they have previously. I don’t want them to stop with my book—I want this to be the beginning of a lot more reading and conversation about what people remember from that time. Why do you think it is important to contextualize the pervasive pain of the AIDS crisis in the modern day? For one thing, that pain is still here. It’s tempting, in the US, to think of AIDS as something in the past, but globally there are 37 million people living with HIV. Even if we are thinking of the late-’80s, early-’90s height of the US crisis, and the gay community it primarily impacted, people are still living in the shadow of those years, feeling those losses, and putting their lives back together. It was important to me to write not just about the ’80s, but about the reach of the epidemic across decades. What, if any, parallels did you discover between the state of health care during the 1980s and now? Legislation of health care is still based on subconscious (or even conscious) prejudices about who deserves to live and who doesn’t. Just in December 2017, Trump disbanded the HIV/AIDS Advisory Council, despite the fact that over a million Americans are still living with HIV. That’s not random; that’s coming straight from homophobia and racism, and the idea that those million lives are disposable. And when it’s not sexual orientation or race, it’s gender, poverty level, education. Certain individuals, some of whom are unfortunately in power, love to blame people for their own illnesses—you shouldn’t have drunk all that soda, you shouldn’t have had sex, you shouldn’t have lived in Flint. I think it’s a way they make themselves feel safer, like nothing bad will happen to them , and I think it’s also a way to sanction mass cruelty. In the ’80s, the glee with which some politicians talked about gay men dying was barely contained; most politicians do a better job now of hiding their motivations, but they’re still there, festering. Nothing new under the sun. Why did you title this book The Great Believers ? The title is taken from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that serves as one of the novel’s epigraphs: “We were the great believers. I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved—and who now walk the long stormy summer.” Fitzgerald is referring to the Lost Generation, and the quote struck me as so counterintuitive—we often think of that generation as so jaded and worldly.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  grief and lamentation, as urged and practiced by the prophets, begin the dismantling of royal reality. Expressed suffering is the beginning of counterpower. See G. Müller-Fahrenholz, “Overcoming Apathy,” EcRev 27 (1975) 48–56. He follows the study of A. Mitscherlich in noting the inability of Germans to grieve over the Nazi period. Such an observation coincides with the findings of Lifton. The argument of Müller-Fahrenholz agrees with the point made here, that without grief there will not be the overcoming of apathy and the embrace of new tasks. On pathos as a prerequisite for protest, see James L. Crenshaw, “The Human Dilemma and Literature of Dissent,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, 235–37; Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: Embrace of Pain,” CBQ 47 (1985): 395–415. 9 . Compare William L. Holladay, “The Background of Jeremiah’s Self- Understanding: Moses, Samuel, and Psalm 22,” JBL 83 (1964): 153–64. Less directly, see Sheldon Blank, “The Prophet as Paradigm,” in Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt, in Memoriam , ed. J. L. Crenshaw and J. T. Willis (New York: Ktav, 1974), 111–30. On grief as definitional for the tradition of Jeremiah, see Peter Weter, “Leiden und Leidenerfahung im Buch Jeremia,” ZTK 74 (1977): 123–50. 10 . On the Lord’s passion borne by Jeremiah, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), chap. 6. 11 . Compare Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), sec. 14. Much of his argument concerns the freedom of God and the royal penchant to deny time for some “eternal now.” Against that, biblical faith lives in God’s times, times of recollection and expectation. 12 . On Jeremiah’s remarkable use of this metaphor, see the statement of James Muilenburg, “The Terminology of Adversity in Jeremiah,” in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament: Essays in Honor of Herbert Gordon May , ed. H. T. Frank and W. L. Reed (New York: Abingdon, 1970), 42–63. 13 . See the delicate interpretation of Phyllis Trible, “The Gift of the Poem: A Rhetorical Study of Jeremiah 31:15-22,” Andover Newton Quarterly 17

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Not that it’s ever completely gone. It’s still there, buried deep, a part of you. The stench is gone from your nostrils now Unless someone leaves the kettle on to boil and forgets about it. The nightmares have tapered out. There are more pressing things to dream about, to worry over, to keep you awake at night. Aging parents, adolescent children, work, money, the state of the world. Life goes on, as our parents promised that winter. Life goes on if you’re one of the lucky ones. But we’re still part of a secret club, One we’d never willingly join, With members who have nothing in common except a time and a place. We’ll always be connected by that winter. Anyone who tells you different is lying. The final speaker is Gaby Wenders. She introduces the boy heroes, especially her hero, Mason McKittrick. Then her husband, Dr. Larsen, her children and grandchildren present a plaque to Mason. The oldest grandchild, maybe five, says to Mason, Thank you for our Gaby. There’s not a dry eye in the house. After the presentation to Mason it feels as if the program is over. People stand and begin to say goodbye to one another, when the doors swing open and Natalie makes her entrance, swooping in like a high-fashion gypsy, the “Queen of New Age,” as she’s known, her Santa Fe jewelry jangling on her wrists and around her neck. A buzz goes through the crowd and people take their seats again. After all, she’s Natalie Renso. She’s famous. You can see her on TV, at readings and book signings, in fashion magazines. Most people don’t know Renso is Osner spelled backward, the kind of code name children come up with in third grade. But it’s worked well for Natalie. She steps up to the podium, waits for the whispering to die down and begins. “It was the winter that changed our lives,” she says. “The winter we learned who we were, and what we were made of.” And that’s it. She doesn’t say a word about Ruby. Just that she’ll be happy to sign books—please write the name of the person you’d like her to sign for on a Post-it. Even Lee Patterson, daughter of the Secretary of War, lines up to get her signature. “My daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t bring her a signed book.” Miri does not get in line. She hangs back. “Did you really sleep with Warren Beatty?” someone asks Natalie. “Why not?” Natalie answers. “Everyone who had the chance did.” She laughs, and the crowd laughs with her. —CHRISTINA DOESN’T LIKE whatever’s going on between Miri and Mason. You’d have to be an idiot to miss it. The two of them making goo-goo eyes at each other all through lunch. Jack tells her to let it be, they’re adults, they’re not going to do anything stupid, anything that would mess up their lives.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  When I was a med student, the first patient I met with this sort of problem was a sixty-two-year-old man with a brain tumor. We strolled into his room on morning rounds, and the resident asked him, “Mr. Michaels, how are you feeling today?” “Four six one eight nineteen!” he replied, somewhat affably. The tumor had interrupted his speech circuitry, so he could speak only in streams of numbers, but he still had prosody, he could still emote: smile, scowl, sigh. He recited another series of numbers, this time with urgency. There was something he wanted to tell us, but the digits could communicate nothing other than his fear and fury. The team prepared to leave the room; for some reason, I lingered. “Fourteen one two eight,” he pleaded with me, holding my hand. “Fourteen one two eight.” “I’m sorry.” “Fourteen one two eight,” he said mournfully, staring into my eyes. And then I left to catch up to the team. He died a few months later, buried with whatever message he had for the world. When tumors or malformations abut these language areas, the surgeon takes numerous precautions, ordering a host of different scans, a detailed neuropsychological examination. Critically, however, the surgery is performed with the patient awake and talking. Once the brain is exposed, but before the tumor excision, the surgeon uses a hand-held ball-tip electrode to deliver electrical current to stun a small area of the cortex while the patient performs various verbal tasks: naming objects, reciting the alphabet, and so on. When the electrode sends current into a critical piece of cortex, it disrupts the patient’s speech: “A B C D E guh guh guh rrrr…F G H I…” The brain and the tumor are thus mapped to determine what can be resected safely, and the patient is kept awake throughout, occupied with a combination of formal verbal tasks and small talk. One evening, as I was prepping for one of these cases, I reviewed the patient’s MRI and noted that the tumor completely covered the language areas. Not a good sign. Reviewing the notes, I saw that the hospital’s tumor board—an expert panel of surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, and pathologists—had deemed the case too dangerous for surgery. How could the surgeon have opted to proceed? I became a little indignant: at a certain point, it was our job to say no. The patient was wheeled into the room. He fixed his eyes on me and pointed to his head. “I want this thing out of my fucking brain. Got it?” The attending strolled in and saw the expression on my face. “I know,” he said. “I tried talking him out of this for about two hours. Don’t bother. Ready to go?” Instead of the usual alphabet recital or counting exercise, we were treated, throughout the surgery, to a litany of profanity and exhortation.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  discernment of what the prophets are about. Such a form indicates grief as the proper context for such speech and indicates the heavy misunderstanding of the prophets in many circles where “woe” is understood as threat and rage. For an interpretation of “woe” in terms of honor and shame, see K. C. Hanson, “How Honorable! How Shameful! A Cultural Analysis of Matthew’s Makarisms and Reproaches,” Semeia 68 (1996): 81–111. 16 . The cross thus is the announcement that God has abandoned all theology of triumph and glory. See the arguments of Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). 17 . Paul Lehmann, The Transformation of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) 48–70. 18 . Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective, OBT (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 132–36. 19 . The argument of Lifton from chap. 3 is pertinent here. The collapse has to do finally not with visible, imperial items but with the collapse of the symbol system. Alienation from a symbol system that leaves us disconnected is the harshness of this criticism. 20 . See R. H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (New York: Scribner, 1965), 207. 21 . On embrace of negation see Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chap. 2 and passim. See also Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: The Embrace of Pain,” CBQ 47 (1985): 395– 415. Chapter 6 1 . On the distinction between hope and process or optimism, see Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chaps. 1 and 3; also Jürgen Moltmann,

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  "He's taken everything from me," I cried. "I don't know him anymore, I don't recognize myself, I've lost the peace of mind and ease with which I used to walk through the world. I used to think to myself at random moments of the day, I'm happy, I love my life. Now I'm terrified I'll always be sad and angry and the enormity of my emotions is eating me alive. I want my old life back," I said, and with that, covered my face with my hands and let my body heave. "Laura, look at me," she said, after a few minutes of letting me air my grief. "I need you to look at me." I dropped my hands from my face and raised my eyes to meet hers, taking in her serene demeanor, her silver hair, her kind eyes. She leaned forward toward me, her eyes never straying from mine. "You are still you. You have not lost the essence of yourself. I see you. I see who you are. There's no old life and new life, there's just you. Don't ever give anyone the power to take you away from yourself. You will always know who you are, no one can change that." "OK," I said, sniffling and holding her steady gaze. "What if I'm so lost that I can't remember who I am or find myself in here? What if I'm actually lost forever?"

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Then last year, my beautiful Beet…a nickname hung on him by the SEALS…died in a firefight with a vicious gang in Africa. That he, a superbly trained professional, should die at the hands of rank amateurs strung out on local drugs was almost beyond belief. I completed my contract, taking a terrible toll on the tribal militia that had killed my beloved. Collecting my own pay and a whopping life insurance settlement as Beet’s beneficiary, I returned to the United States and tarried in the East until it was clear Uncle Sam had no beef with me for my activities of the last five years. Then I returned home. Marcus Markey was an eight-year-old neighbor kid when I left for boot camp at Grand Island Naval Training Station. The boy had lived next door to us since the family returned to Victor upon the death of his GI father in Kosovo. Markey, who had adopted me as his big brother, struggled beside me with all the push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, dips, flutter kicks, running and swimming I did for a month to get ready for boot. He even attempted the Ninjutsu and Israeli Krav Maga moves recommended by the BUD/S—that would be the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—website. After each workout, he liked to run his hands over my sweaty biceps to test the hard muscle; it bothered me in a vague way I didn’t understand back then. Markey went to the bus station with my family to see me off, and I still recall his thin arms locked around my waist in a good-bye hug, and the tears that soaked my shirt. Now, glancing at him as we strode down the meadow, I could still see traces of that shy, adoring kid in this lanky twenty-three-year-old. He’d retained the creamy complexion and black sloe-eyes that gave him a slightly foreign cast. A once shaggy mop of black hair was cut short in a vaguely military style. But if Markey ever joined up, he was in for a bad time until he got tough enough to secure his own ground. It wasn’t just that he was far beyond merely handsome; his long, curled lashes alone would earn him grief in the barracks. Markey could have been a beautiful girl except for the Adam’s apple. I wondered if he had ever cross-dressed. There wasn’t a sign of a beard on his smooth skin, although I’m sure there was one; it merely cleaned up well. There wasn’t much of the kid I knew fifteen years ago in this fantastic youth—except for the shy, diffident demeanor. “Kinda small,” he observed wryly as we reached the fallen stag. “It’ll make good venison. Well, let’s get at it,” I suggested, noting the absence of any pride in the kill. “We’ve gotta field dress him.” “You mean cut him up?” The words were almost strangled. “You want to leave him for the coyotes?” “N-no. Of course not. But I don’t know how.”

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Each member of the family shared his or her specific concerns regarding the group and how it had affected the young woman’s behavior. Her parents expressed profound sorrow concerning her recent decision to stop communicating with them. They explained that regardless of what she believed, they would always love her; therefore, they couldn’t understand why she had decided to cut them off. Her sibling talked about the many months that had gone by without any word from her and about how much she had been missed. In conclusion her husband explained that the young woman’s commitment to the group had seemed to supersede any practical consideration, including their marriage and the care of their small children. The young woman’s parents explained that since she had become involved with the Call of God, she had drifted farther and farther away from family and old friends. Her sibling said the same thing. The husband expressed fears of a marital breakdown and child neglect. He said that due to his disinterest in the group, his wife was increasingly treating him like an unwanted stranger rather than like a loving spouse. He explained that she was so busy with the group that she was increasingly overlooking their small children’s needs. The husband said that from his perspective, the situation was progressively becoming worse and that at times his wife seemed hostile and angry when he mentioned his concerns. After several hours of conversation about family concerns, the young woman became visibly agitated and protested that this was somehow an “attack” on her faith. I assured her that no one present wished to criticize her faith but rather the behavior of the group and the influence of its leader. At this point her mother emphasized that she respected her daughter’s faith and could see no conflict regarding religion within the framework of the expressed concerns. The young woman calmed down. I then reiterated that the focus of my work as a consultant was group behavior, not religious beliefs. We discussed some basic elemental issues concerning Jesus and the New Testament. For example, Jesus once said, “Many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.”764 We agreed that, according to this scripture, the claim that someone speaks for God may be false. According to the New Testament, Jesus also warned, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”765 He then further explained, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”766 We discussed this process of discernment based on a careful examination of the person’s fruits. How did they affect people? What did they produce? How did they behave? Could they be a wolf in disguise? I asked the young woman to become a fruit inspector based on this biblically mandated process, and she agreed.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "Terrence, once the doctor had confirmed what they knew he would, did not collapse. He said to the doctor, in a voice like hollow stone, 'I'll be back in two hours. You're going to clean him up, right? And they'll have their time. And I will be back in two hours.' His knee was still hurt from running into the cleaning cart that morning, but he scooped Fiona up like she weighed nothing and walked straight out of the hospital. … Terrence had carried Fiona around the outside of the hospital for twenty full minutes until she was ready to come back in and call for a ride. That someone, concerned that a black man was carrying a sobbing white woman around the parking lot, called the police, and an officer showed up and trailed them slowly, until Fiona shouted that she was fine, that it wasn't illegal for a person to carry another person, was it?"

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "He opened them, slowly, to a man who wasn't Charlie. He wanted to tell Teresa she'd taken him to the wrong place, that this withered fetus on the bed was no one he knew. But Teresa was stroking this man's scalp, and when the man's mouth hung open, Yale saw Charlie's teeth. He was an alien, an Auschwitz skeleton, a baby bird fallen from its nest. Yale's mind kept reaching for metaphors, because the simple fact of it—that this was Charlie—was too much. … The nurse came in, and she showed Yale a small pink sponge on the end of a stick, showed him how he could hold it to Charlie's lips to give him water. He did it for a while, and he ran his thumb over Charlie's wrist, listening to the thrumming of the walls. He fed him water, drop by drop."

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "'Well, you! Your friends! I don't know how it's like anything other than war!' … 'Every time I've gone to a gallery, the rest of my life, I've thought about the works that weren't there. Shadow-paintings, you know, that no one can see but you. But there are all these happy young people around you and you realize no, they're not bereft. They don't see the empty spaces.'"

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn't they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out? Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts. … Although it made no sense at all, she'd never fully been able to shake the ridiculous, narcissistic feeling that the whole epidemic was somehow her fault. … She felt, sometimes, like some horrible Hindu god, turning all she touched to ash."

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I developed the characteristic severe acne that correlates with a good response. Lucy had always loved my smooth skin, but now it was pockmarked and, with my blood thinners, constantly bleeding. Any part of me that identified with being handsome was slowly being erased—though, in fairness, I was happy to be uglier and alive. Lucy said she loved my skin just the same, acne and all, but while I knew that our identities derive not just from the brain, I was living its embodied nature. The man who loved hiking, camping, and running, who expressed his love through gigantic hugs, who threw his giggling niece high in the air—that was a man I no longer was.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Warm rays of evening light began to slant through the northwest-facing window of the room as Paul's breaths grew more quiet. Cady rubbed her eyes with chubby fists as her bedtime approached, and a family friend arrived to take her home. I held her cheek to Paul's, tufts of their matching dark hair similarly askew, his face serene, hers quizzical but calm, his beloved baby never suspecting that this moment was a farewell. Softly I sang Cady's bedtime song, to her, to both of them, and then released her. As the room darkened into night, a low wall lamp glowing warmly, Paul's breaths became faltering and irregular. His body continued to appear restful, his limbs relaxed. Just before nine o'clock, his lips apart and eyes closed, Paul inhaled and then released one last, deep, final breath.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Terrence had screamed into the hallway for the nurses, had run into a cleaning cart and hurt his knee, and the fucking nurses were more concerned about whether or not Terrence had shed blood than about what was happening to Nico. And here on the slide was Nico’s full, beautiful face, and it was too much. Yale dashed up the rest of the stairs. He worried the bedrooms would be full of guys who’d been taking poppers, but the first one, at least, was empty. He closed the door and sat on the bed. It was dark out now, the sparse streetlights of Belden just barely illuminating the walls and floor. Richard must have redone at least this one room after the mysterious wife moved out. Two black leather chairs flanked the wide bed. There was a small shelf of art books. Yale put his glass on the floor and lay back to stare at the ceiling and do the slow-breathing trick Charlie had taught him. All fall, he’d been memorizing the list of the gallery’s regular donors. Tuning out the downstairs noise, he did what he often did at home when he couldn’t sleep: He named donors starting with A , then ones starting with B . A fair number overlapped with the Art Institute donors he’d worked with for the past three years, but there were hundreds of new names—Northwestern alumni, North Shore types—that he needed to recognize on the spot. Recently he’d found the list disconcerting—had felt a dull gray uneasiness around it. He remembered being eight and asking his father who else in the neighborhood was Jewish (“Are the Rothmans Jewish? Are the Andersens?”) and his father rubbing his chin, saying, “Let’s not do that, buddy. Historically, bad things happen when we make lists of Jews.” It wasn’t till years later that Yale realized this was a hang-up unique to his father, to his brand of self-hatred. But Yale had been young and impressionable, and maybe that’s why the reciting of names chafed. Or no, maybe it was this: Lately he’d had two parallel mental lists going—the donor list and the sick list. The people who might donate art or money, and the friends who might get sick; the big donors, the ones whose names you’d never forget, and the friends he’d already lost. But they weren’t close friends, the lost ones, until tonight. They’d been acquaintances, friends of friends like Nico’s old roommate Jonathan, a couple of gallery owners, one bartender, the bookstore guy. There were, what, six? Six people he knew of, people he’d say hi to at a bar, people whose middle names he couldn’t tell you, and maybe not even their last names. He’d been to three memorials. But now, a new list: one close friend. Yale and Charlie had gone to an informational meeting last year with a speaker from San Francisco. He’d said, “I know guys who’ve lost no one. Groups that haven’t been touched.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I close my eyes. [...] In my head, I see my closet. The brown-orange shag carpet. I picture a ruched floral dress on the floor, a pair of discarded jeans. I see me, maybe six years old, with big eyes and thick, straight-across bangs. I'm wearing a T-shirt and turquoise shorts. And then I see her. Some amalgamation of my mother and Faye Dunaway maybe, screaming, wielding a wire hanger. She is whipping a child version of me as I stand to the side, watching. Red welts form on my child-self's upper legs. My mother screams. "How many times have I told you to hang these up? Why can't you take care of nice things? Why do we spend all this money on you when you just waste it? What kind of daughter are you?" [...] I had recalled that moment of abuse two hundred times and not once had I ever cried. I never flinched. I always felt calm all over, a flat, barren nothing. [...] But this had been something else. Those little buzzers had worked some kind of electronic Robin Williams magic. I didn't just understand the weight of my abuse logically. I felt it, like a blade through flesh, like a bone popping out of place. I felt it like a lover saying it's not going to work: sharp, immediate, and terrifying.

• From Little Women (1868)

  "Not so bad as it seems, for I should only plague him if I went, so I might as well stay and plague you a little longer, you can bear it better, in fact I think it agrees with you excellently," and Laurie composed himself for a lounge on the broad ledge of the balustrade. Amy shook her head and opened her sketchbook with an air of resignation, but she had made up her mind to lecture 'that boy' and in a minute she began again. "What are you doing just now?" "Watching lizards." "No, no. I mean what do you intend and wish to do?" "Smoke a cigarette, if you'll allow me." "How provoking you are! I don't approve of cigars and I will only allow it on condition that you let me put you into my sketch. I need a figure." "With all the pleasure in life. How will you have me, full length or three-quarters, on my head or my heels? I should respectfully suggest a recumbent posture, then put yourself in also and call it 'Dolce far niente'." "Stay as you are, and go to sleep if you like. I intend to work hard," said Amy in her most energetic tone. "What delightful enthusiasm!" and he leaned against a tall urn with an air of entire satisfaction. "What would Jo say if she saw you now?" asked Amy impatiently, hoping to stir him up by the mention of her still more energetic sister's name. "As usual, 'Go away, Teddy. I'm busy!'" He laughed as he spoke, but the laugh was not natural, and a shade passed over his face, for the utterance of the familiar name touched the wound that was not healed yet. Both tone and shadow struck Amy, for she had seen and heard them before, and now she looked up in time to catch a new expression on Laurie's face—a hard bitter look, full of pain, dissatisfaction, and regret. It was gone before she could study it and the listless expression back again. She watched him for a moment with artistic pleasure, thinking how like an Italian he looked, as he lay basking in the sun with uncovered head and eyes full of southern dreaminess, for he seemed to have forgotten her and fallen into a reverie. "You look like the effigy of a young knight asleep on his tomb," she said, carefully tracing the well-cut profile defined against the dark stone. "Wish I was!" "That's a foolish wish, unless you have spoiled your life. You are so changed, I sometimes think—" there Amy stopped, with a half-timid, half-wistful look, more significant than her unfinished speech. Laurie saw and understood the affectionate anxiety which she hesitated to express, and looking straight into her eyes, said, just as he used to say it to her mother, "It's all right, ma'am." That satisfied her and set at rest the doubts that had begun to worry her lately.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Prince did not apply to Harvard, nor Princeton, nor Yale, nor Columbia, nor Stanford. He only wanted The Mecca. I asked Dr. Jones if she regretted Prince choosing Howard. She gasped. It was as though I had pushed too hard on a bruise. “No,” she said. “I regret that he is dead.” She said this with great composure and greater pain. She said this with all of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you. Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the ’60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debt later. Whatever it is, that same look I see in those pictures, noble and vacuous, was the look I saw in Mable Jones. It was in her sharp brown eyes, which welled but did not break. She held so much under her control, and I was sure the days since her Rocky was plundered, since her lineage was robbed, had demanded nothing less. And she could not lean on her country for help. When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best—it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.