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 The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC, AND APOSTOLIC? 86 unity"; for the pope himself acknowledged that the whole church, from head to foot, desperately needed reformation, and, as one of the participants put it, "without [reformation], the other . . . goals either cannot be attained or cannot endure." One of the accusations against the Hussites at this council was that they had permitted their zeal for the holiness of the church and their offense at the public sins in the church to carry them to the point of violating its unity. A schism on moral grounds had the tendency to go on spawning ever new schisms, for even the new sect would not be pure enough for some, who would sep- arate themselves yet again in their quest for a truly holy church. Still, even the restoration of unity under one pope had not achieved true reform, one observer lamented in 1449. It was the attribute "holy" that had been the most prominent of the four classic attributes of the church in the ancient creeds, and theologians as far apart as Peter Chelcicky and James of Viterbo were in agreement that this required a separation from sin and from all impurity. Among the many senses in which the church was holy, one of the most important to its defenders against heresy and schism in the fif- teenth century was that "it cannot err in those things that are necessary for salvation, because at the time in which it would err in these things it would no longer be holy." In at least some of the senses of the word, it was becoming increasingly difficult to call the church holy. Those who asked, "[If] church is built upon a solid rock. . . . How is it that you say it needs refor- mation?" were in the minority, at least among thoughtful churchmen, whose questions were rather: "Has not the entire state of the church become some- how brutal and monstrous?" or "Which shepherd today would give his life for his sheep? In fact, which shepherd has not been transformed into a wolf that devours their souls?" or "If [the pope] is unable or unwilling to reform his own curia, which he has under his wings, why is there any reason to believe that he can reform the church, which is so widely scattered?" Quoting the lamentations of Bernard over the corruption of the church, they would add the dismal comment: "And since then the church has

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Listening to Bell, I recalled a conversation I’d had with Mackenzie, a sophomore at a Bay Area high school dominated by hookup culture. She was going through a rocky patch when we met: her boyfriend of a year had just cheated on her, making out with another girl while drunk at a party, and she was conflicted over whether to break things off. She was often teary as we talked, describing ways she’d “lost herself” in their relationship. “I’m not saying that’s all a negative thing, though,” she added. “I’ve learned a lot about myself, too. I’ve learned that I have so much to me. I have a lot to give. Also I learned a lot about myself and vulnerability. I can love very deeply, and I think that’s a good thing. I’ve learned a lot about my body, about my mind—just being with someone else, hearing their views on things, being intimate. I’m still learning. I’m learning what it’s like to deal with heartbreak and someone you believed would never hurt you and he did. All of that.”

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  “I was practicing solo landings and I did LOUSY!!” Roughly one-fifth of his class had already been demoted. “It’s hell watching these guys wash out,” Jack wrote. He had good reason to fret. Those who couldn’t cut it were sent back to the general corps as infantrymen, which almost certainly meant being a part of the ground troops fighting Hitler’s troops across Europe or slogging through African deserts or Pacific island jungles. At that point in the war, an average of 220 American soldiers and sailors were dying each day. Jack figured it was better to take his chances in the air, even if the rickety planes were so dangerous that he and his buddies referred to them as the “Flying Coffins.” He knew that if he mastered his flying skills, he might become a commercial pilot someday, and wouldn’t that be the life? Trips to Los Angeles, Miami, maybe even Paris. He logged out for the last flight of the night just after 5 p.m. Mrs. W. W. Young and her young son, Charles, were picking cotton in a nearby field when they noticed a plane sputtering out of control, then nose-diving before hitting the ground at a ninety-degree angle. They ran to the plane to see if they could help. “The pilot was still in the cockpit with his head and right arm hanging over the right side,” Mrs. Young would later tell investigators. “I said to him, ‘Son, is there anything I can do for you?’” Jack tried to raise his arm three times and to nod. Mrs. Young sent her son scurrying to a nearby farm to call for help while she waited with Jack. She could hear his breathing grow heavier and more labored. Then he started to cough. By the time help arrived more than twenty minutes later, it was too late. Jack was declared dead at the scene. Grandpa, who had been sent home from the Milwaukee hospital two days earlier, was visiting in the living room with Grandma and some relatives when the doorbell rang. Two army officers stood in the doorway, one with a telegram in his hand. Neighbors said Grandma shrieked so loudly they could hear her from down the block. Holmer, who’d just finished his junior year of high school, was out drinking beer with friends at the time. When he arrived home later that night, the house was dark. He saw the telegram lying on the dining room table. CAUSE OF ACCIDENT UNKNOWN STOP PILOT FATAL STOP Tipsy from beer, Holmer misinterpreted the telegram and thought that Jack was still alive. He went to bed praying for his big brother’s full recovery. Investigators for the Aircraft Accident Board acknowledged that Jack should have been supervised more closely. His judgment was deficient “due to lack of training and experience required to form sound decisions,” army investigators noted. He especially should have been warned about the dangers of flying so low.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Macnamara on her own day off. We climbed the steep hill off the main street opposite the secondary modern school to where Mrs. D.’s new house sat spanking white overlooking the meadows that greenly undulated toward the purple domes of Dartmoor. A flashy blue car parked outside next to the nurse’s discreet pale one. Her house all white walls, full of light, big windows overlooking a plateau of close-cropped green lawn and a rather bald display of flowers—heather, tulips, anemones. A great many Pekingese dogs yapping like fur mice from a wire enclosure. Mrs. Macnamara a handsome white-haired woman (descended from Irish farmers), with red lipstick and a feminine blue-figured blouse and silvery suit. Exuded wealth, well-being. Had come round originally to buy a Pekingese. Lived at Cadbury House beyond Crediton. Her husband, Mrs. D. said, was something in ITV, and lived in a flat in London till he was to retire, for Mrs. Macnamara couldn’t bear going back to London. She had fallen in love with the house, which had 9 acres and was under repair. She had a lot of cats, one ginger one in shreds, pelt split, eye hanging out, from a fight, which she had to go home to swab. She had a doctor daughter in Washington state, married to a doctor, who was the “highest-earning woman” in the state, according to a tax official. The daughter had two daughters of her own and an adopted child. She had three miscarriages before she had a baby, and lost her baby son, born a Siamese twin with the other twin an embryo in his bowel. Insisted on knowing why his prognosis was only to live 8 hours, bundled up the dying baby & traveled 200 miles by train to where he could be operated on by a friend. Then nursed him (“he was quite blind, and deaf, and his hands could grip nothing, they just lay flat”) although she knew he would die in three months, which he did. Ever since she has been impossible, behaved badly, her father won’t let her into the house. Ironically, she was a child-specialist, called on all over to diagnose, prescribe. She had an adopted sister, adopted when she was 12 & had polio, and of the same age. Sisters devoted to each other. We ate tea round a table, a yellow-frosted banana cake with cherries, very good currant buns, dainty tea service. Kitchen in half walled-off area, red counters, big windows overlooking moors. Photographs of places framed in narrow black & hung on white walls. A silver-embroidered Oriental screen in living room, an African violet, a little vase of early lilies of the valley, a sunny window seat, a handsome radio with all the foreign stations. Mrs. Davies in gray, with silver earrings. After Mrs.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  As a result, a human child in most societies does not become capable of economic independence or adult economic function until his or her teenage years or twenties. Until then, the child remains dependent on his or her parents, especially on the mother, because, as we saw in previous chapters, mothers tend to provide more child care than do fathers. Parents are important not only for gathering food and teaching tool making but also for providing protection and status within the tribe. In traditional societies, the early death of either the mother or the father prejudiced a child’s life even if the surviving parent remarried, because of possible conflicts with the stepparent’s genetic interests. A young orphan who was not adopted had even worse chances of surviving. Hence a hunter-gatherer mother who already has several children risks losing some of her genetic investment in them if she does not survive until the youngest is at least a teenager. That one cruel fact underlying human female menopause becomes more ominous in the light of another cruel fact: the birth of each child immediately jeopardizes a mother’s previous children because of the mother’s risk of death in childbirth. In most other animal species, that risk is insignificant. For example, in one study encompassing 401 pregnant female rhesus macaques, only one died in childbirth. For humans in traditional societies, the risk was much higher and increased with age. Even in affluent, twentieth-century Western societies, the risk of dying in childbirth is seven times higher for a mother over the age of forty than for a twenty-year-old mother. But each new child puts the mother’s life at risk not only because of the immediate risk of death in childbirth but also because of the delayed risk of death related to exhaustion by lactation, carrying a young child, and working harder to feed more mouths. Yet another cruel fact is that infants of older mothers are themselves increasingly unlikely to survive or be healthy because of age-related increases in the risks of abortion, stillbirth, low fetal weight, and genetic defects. For instance, the risk of a fetus carrying the genetic condition known as Down’s syndrome increases with the mother’s age, from one in two thousand births for a mother under thirty, one in three hundred for a mother between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine, and one in fifty for a forty-three-year-old mother, to the grim odds of one in ten for a mother in her late forties.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  Secrets, sharing, and friendship: This viewpoint asserts that the process of disclosure involves (1) a decision to disclose in an attempt to reach a desired goal (e.g., enhanced relationship intimacy), (2) the actual communication between disclosure and confidant, (3) processes that elicit relationship changes (changes in social support, inhibition, and social information), and (4) feedback loops (a disclosure event will impact subsequent events by increasing or decreasing the capacity and willingness of the discloser to disclose). Also, as noted, disclosure events are a component of “stigma management”—that is, by participating in one disclosure event, individuals can “test the water” and determine reactions/cope with consequences. The outcome of these probes will determine whether future disclosure events occur.Extramarital affairs: The discovery of an extramarital affair often has devastating effects on a marriage. Gordon and colleagues explored the use of an integrative treatment, including a letter-writing-based emotional disclosure component, to enhance the chance of positive recovery for couples going through an affair issue. Couples reported less marital distress and greater forgiveness for the offense at the end of treatment compared to when they began.Friends and secrets: Jamie found when examining data from a large sample of corporate employees, that people with large social support networks who kept a big secret about a major trauma had more health problems than people who had small social support networks. Presumably, holding back a big secret is far more work for people with lots of friends.Stress and infectious disease: As an interesting aside, research psychologist Sheldon Cohen and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University have convincingly demonstrated through a series of elegant studies that this supposition is quite true—psychological stress can meaningfully increase the likelihood of becoming ill, and the severity of illness, after exposure to the common cold virus. CHAPTER 9

• From The City of God

  If Marcus Pulvillus, when engaged in dedicating a temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, received with such indifference the false intelligence which was brought to him of the death of his son, with the intention of so agitating him that he should go away, and thus the glory of dedicating the temple should fall to his colleague;--if he received that intelligence with such indifference that he even ordered that his son should be cast out unburied, the love of glory having overcome in his heart the grief of bereavement, how shall any one affirm that he has done a great thing for the preaching of the gospel, by which the citizens of the heavenly city are delivered from divers errors, and gathered together from divers wanderings, to whom his Lord has said, when anxious about the burial of his father, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead?"[215] Regulus, in order not to break his oath, even with his most cruel enemies, returned to them from Rome itself, because (as he is said to have replied to the Romans when they wished to retain him) he could not have the dignity of an honourable citizen at Rome after having been a slave to the Africans, and the Carthaginians put him to death with the utmost tortures, because he had spoken against them in the senate. If Regulus acted thus, what tortures are not to be despised for the sake of good faith toward that country to whose beatitude faith itself leads? Or what will a man have rendered to the Lord for all He has bestowed upon him, if, for the faithfulness he owes to Him, he shall have suffered such things as Regulus suffered at the hands of his most ruthless enemies for the good faith which he owed to them? And how shall a Christian dare vaunt himself of his voluntary poverty, which he has chosen in order that during the pilgrimage of this life he may walk the more disencumbered on the way which leads to the country where the true riches are, even God Himself;--how, I say, shall he vaunt himself for this, when he hears or reads that Lucius Valerius, who died when he was holding the office of consul, was so poor that his funeral expenses were paid with money collected by the people?--or when he hears that Quintius Cincinnatus, who, possessing only four acres of land, and cultivating them with his own hands, was taken from the plough to be made dictator,--an office more honourable even than that of consul,--and that, after having won great glory by conquering the enemy, he preferred notwithstanding to continue in his poverty?

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The Thessalonian question concerns the relative status of those dead and those alive at the Lord’s parousia, or coming from heaven to earth. The Thessalonians were worried that those who had already died might somehow be disadvantaged at the parousia. Had those Thessalonians died natural deaths or had they been martyred during that persecution because of Paul? The latter alternative seems most likely for two reasons. One is that Paul is extremely defensive about himself in this letter, for example, “You are witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was toward you believers” (1 Thess. 2:10). That tone would be very understandable if he had escaped Thessalonica by flight while others had died there as martyrs. Another is that it may have been martyrdom that made them “an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia,” so that “not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it” (1:7–8). In any case, that same question was asked about fifty years later, in a Jewish apocalypse written after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple but attributed fictionally to Ezra. He asks, “Yet, O Lord, you have charge of those who are alive at the end, but what will those do who were before me, or we, ourselves, or those who come after us?” And the Lord answers, “I shall liken my judgment to a circle; just as for those who are last there is no slowness, so for those who are first there is no haste” (4 Ezra 5:41–42). It is not clear whether that did or did not help Ezra, but it is the obvious answer: All will arise at the same time just as a circle is all there simultaneously. But that is not Paul’s answer: For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming (parousian) of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet (apantésin) the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. (4:15–17)

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  KUNST means “art.” Holmer nicknamed my mother “Maude,” after a foulmouthed old battle-ax who worked the counter at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, where he and his fellow law school students spent hours poring over case files. Holmer made my mother laugh. And she needed a good laugh. Her mother, Chloe, was dying of breast cancer, and the mood at home was grim. My mother was twenty-four years old and terrified of losing her mother. Chloe was always so breezy and cheerful. Without her, who would remind my mother to be brave, to believe in herself, to know that—no matter what life brings—she must have faith that things will get better? Chloe died late that November. Now, in the dead of winter, my mother spent her evenings cleaning out her mother’s closets and writing thank-you notes to the funeral guests while her father refilled his martini glass and sulked in the corner of the living room, often without even bothering to turn on the lights. Adventures with Holmer in his shiny red convertible offered just the escape my mother craved. As unlikely a pair as they seemed to be on the surface, my parents would come to discover that they actually had a lot in common. Holmer, it turned out, was not just a party boy in search of an easy payday, and my mother was more than a well-mannered trust fund baby looking to laugh her way out of her grief. They were each stuck in a bad situation, eager for a fresh start. They both longed for someone who knew how it felt to have your life sailing along in one direction and then, suddenly, one day, without any warning, to have it be turned around so completely that you didn’t know where you were heading anymore. Each was haunted by family shame that they tried to drown in gallons of gin. They were jittery deep down inside, worried that they weren’t good enough. How could they ever stack up against their A-list debutante / law school crowd? They learned early how to pretend like nothing was wrong. Glide on your charm. Besides, they had no business complaining. They were the lucky ones, not like their poor brothers, both named John, one who died in August 1943 and the other who was born two months later. HOLMER’S BROTHER, JOHN MATTHEW Kissinger, known as Jack, died on August 16, 1943, long before my siblings and I were born. Grandma and Grandpa barely spoke about him to us, and neither did Holmer. All we knew was that our uncle Jack had been killed in World War II. Holmer kept a faded photograph of the two of them on his dresser. Jack, who must have been about fourteen when the photo was taken, is sitting astride a motor scooter, wearing a leather jacket and a devilish grin. Holmer, four years younger, is standing behind his brother, sporting a pair of knickers and a double-breasted wool coat, smirking.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The honorable Sir Charles Miltitz, chamber secretary to Your Holiness, has been with us. In the presence of the Most Illustrious Sovereign Frederick, he very harshly accused me in the name of Your Holiness of lacking respect for and being rash toward the Roman church and Your Holiness, and demanded satisfaction for this. Hearing this, I was deeply grieved that my most loyal service has had such an unhappy outcome and that what I had undertaken—to guard the honor of the Roman church—had resulted in disgrace and was suspected of all wickedness, even so far as the head of the church was concerned. But what am I to do, Most Holy Father? I do not know what to do further: I cannot bear the power of your wrath, and I do not know of any means to escape it. The demand is made that I recant my theses. If such a revocation could accomplish what I was attempting to do with my theses, I would issue it without hesitation. Now, however, through the antagonism and pressure of enemies, my writings are spread farther than I ever had expected and are so deeply rooted in the hearts of so many people that I am not in the position to revoke them. In addition since our Germany prospers wonderfully today with men of talent, learning, and judgement, I realize that I cannot under any circumstances recant anything if I want to honor the Roman church—and this has to be my primary concern. Such a recanting would accomplish nothing but to defile the Roman church more and more and bring it into the mouths of the people as something that should be accused. See, Father, those whom I have opposed have inflicted this injury and virtual ignominy on the Roman church among us. With their most insipid sermons, preached in the name of Your Holiness, they have cultivated only the most shameful avarice. . . . Most Holy Father, before God and all his creation, I testify that I have never wanted, nor do I today want, to touch in any way the authority of the Roman church and of Your Holiness or demolish it by any craftiness. On the contrary I confess the authority of this church to be supreme over all, and that nothing, be it in heaven or earth, is to be preferred to it, save the one Jesus Christ who is Lord of all—nor should Your Holiness believe the schemers who claim otherwise, plotting evil against this Martin.

• From The City of God

  18. _How far Christians ought to be from boasting, if they have done anything for the love of the eternal country, when the Romans did such great things for human glory and a terrestrial city._ What great thing, therefore, is it for that eternal and celestial city to despise all the charms of this world, however pleasant, if for the sake of this terrestrial city Brutus could even put to death his son,--a sacrifice which the heavenly city compels no one to make? But certainly it is more difficult to put to death one's sons, than to do what is required to be done for the heavenly country, even to distribute to the poor those things which were looked upon as things to be amassed and laid up for one's children, or to let them go, if there arise any temptation which compels us to do so, for the sake of faith and righteousness. For it is not earthly riches which make us or our sons happy; for they must either be lost by us in our lifetime, or be possessed when we are dead, by whom we know not, or perhaps by whom we would not. But it is God who makes us happy, who is the true riches of minds. But of Brutus, even the poet who celebrates his praises testifies that it was the occasion of unhappiness to him that he slew his son, for he says, "And call his own rebellious seed For menaced liberty to bleed. Unhappy father! howsoe'er The deed be judged by after days."[213] But in the following verse he consoles him in his unhappiness, saying, "His country's love shall all o'erbear."

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It gets worse again. The Temple had come to symbolize the nationalist movement that had led many Jews to revolt against pagan oppression in the past and would lead them to do so once more. As we see graphically throughout the history of Israel, and not least in the first century, the Temple was the sign that Israel’s God, the world’s creator, was with his people and would defend them against all comers. Battle and Temple had gone together for a thousand years, from David himself through to Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. And Jesus had come as the Prince of Peace. “If only you’d known,” he sobbed out through his tears, “on this day—even you!—what peace meant. But now it’s hidden, and you can’t see it.” Enemies will come, he said. “They won’t leave one single stone on another, because you didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you” (Luke 19:42–44). Israel’s God was coming back at last, and they couldn’t see it. Why not? Because they were looking in entirely the wrong direction. The Temple, and the city of which the Temple was the focal point, had come to symbolize violent national revolution. Instead of being the light of the world, the city on the hill that should let its light shine out to the nations, it was determined to keep the light for itself. The Temple was not just redundant; not just a place of economic oppression. It had become a symbol of Israel’s violent ambition, a sign that Israel’s ancient vocation had been turned inside out. In Luke’s gospel, the scene of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem balances the scene near the start in which Jesus goes to Nazareth and risks his neck by declaring God’s blessing on the pagan nations. Then it was the synagogue; now it’s the Temple. It also balances the scene even earlier, when the twelve-year-old Jesus stays back in Jerusalem, to his parents’ alarm, at the end of a Passover celebration—and is finally discovered sitting in the Temple with the teachers, listening to them, quizzing them in turn, and explaining that he had to be getting involved with his father’s work (2:49). Now here he is, back again, involved up to the neck in his father’s work, astonishing the Jerusalem authorities for a different reason. This is the climax of his father’s work, and that work is now focused on Jesus himself, not the Temple. If Jesus is acting out a vision—astonishing, risky, and one might say crazy—in which he is behaving as if he is the Temple, redefining sacred space around himself, something equally strange and risky is taking place in the realm of time. Time Fulfilled

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Yeah, so the thing is, that little riverway that leads to the sea? Right there at Heceta head? It has a mean cross-current. So while Phillip and I stood there watching the little box float nearly out of eyesight, we also stood and watched it … come the fuck back. Pretty much to our very feet. Knocking itself against his shoe. I looked back over my shoulder to where the posse of sadness that was my idiotic family stood - they were far away, almost dots. I looked at Phillip. Then I said, try kicking it out. No, I don’t know why I said that. So he, um, kicked it. This time it didn’t go very far at all, it simply launched soggily into the air and plunked back down and circled back to us, just slower this time. Without being able to stop, I started laughing. And he started laughing. I mean hard. I said go get it, goddamn it. So he did. By then the little box had begun to disintegrate. Cheap ass pink crappy cardboard. As I peeled the dumb paper away, I saw that the ashes were actually inside a little plastic bag. Almost like a pot baggie. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t help it, and Phillip went what? And peeked over my shoulder. We had giggles we couldn’t stop. I said goddamn it I have to stop laughing. It’s not funny. It’s pretty fucking far from funny. He agreed, but he couldn’t stop either. I had snot all over my face. I was laughing so hard my stomach - former world - hurt. Finally I knew what to do. I opened the little faux caul full of ash carefully with my teeth. Like animals do. Then I walked out into the ocean for real. I had a vintage red wool coat on. And brushed leather cowboy boots. Phillip tried to follow me in but I said no. I wave walked until I was up to my abdomen. The water felt ice cold on my stitches. Numbed the hurt there. I dumped the nearly weightless contents of my daughter into my right hand. Some of the ash blew into the air, but most of it didn’t. It was wet. Like sand. And then I let my right hand lower into the water, and I let go. I closed my eyes. My father told me later it was the bravest thing he has ever seen. I never knew how to take that. When I walked out of the water back to my first husband, he held me close - we were already apart by then - but he did it anyway. Then I felt his shoulders shaking, and I thought he was crying, but nope, he was laughing again, so I said what? And he pointed to the side of my vintage red coat at the smear of ashmud there. I laughed again too and went I know. I know. Clutching each other.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Then he was saying “When Jed died, everyone who talked to me said something asinine. Like the craziest crap you can imagine. No one understands death anymore. Death used to be sacred. Look at the Upanishads. Goddamn religion has killed death.” I had read the letter he wrote to friends Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Ed McClanahan, Bob Stone, and Gurney Norman in the summer of 1984 in CoEvolution Quarterly when Jed died. How they built a box for his body themselves. How he threw a silver whistle with a Hopi cross soldered on it into the grave. How the first shovelfuls of dirt sounded like “the Thunderclaps of Revelation.” I held my breath. I thought about water. I thought about the ashes of my daughter swimming in the ocean off the coast of Oregon. The deaths of our children swam in the water with us, curling around us, keeping us twinned and floating. So if Ken said these things to me, does it really matter if he was in the water or not? If meeting Ken so close to a death brought writing into my hands, and if I cast that out as a dreamy lake front scene, who gives a shit if he was in the water? His big hearted wrestler’s body. His irreverent mouth. His dead son. My hollowed out gut. Me in my better world. From the water I could see him on the shore, a little miniature Kesey doing his former Kesey thing, the smaller man within a man like a Russian doll. That night I swam the lake and back trying to drown out voices. Father BEFORE MY FATHER’S HANDS MOVED AGAINST US HE was an architect; lover of art. Before my father was an architect he was a navigator in the Korean War. Before my father was a navigator he was an artist. Before my father was an artist he was an athlete. Before my father was an athlete he was an unhappy altar boy. That’s the best I can do. I think. Goddamn it. Let me try again. Before my father’s hands moved against us he was an architect; lover of art.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  My mother was his caretaker in Florida until she got cancer and died. So in 2001 there he was, all alone in a house he barely recognized, facing the prospect of the State taking ownership of him and depositing him in a nursing home for the rest of his life. Have you ever visited nursing homes in Gainesville, Florida? I have. Let me put it this way. Walking in the door of one brings a disgust to your throat like someone grabbed it. They smell like urine and dead skin and Lysol. The creatures tooling around in wheelchairs or “walking” down halls look befuddled. Like hunched over zombies. In the dining room women whose hair and lipstick are not on straight and men who’ve wet themselves shove pureed gruel in their mouths. But what makes them particularly hideous in a Floridian sense is the heat. The humidity. The air conditioning that doesn’t work quite right. The mold on the walls here and there. Cockroaches. Sometimes the old meat sacks sagging toward death in their beds are restrained. Whoever I am, I am not a woman who could leave someone to rot in a place like that. Even him. The grief I carried about my mother’s death lodged in me like a baseball I’d swallowed whole. Inside my treehouse sanctuary with Andy and Miles, every night I would dream about her. Every morning I would wake up feeling vaguely like I had been crying. But something else wedged itself between me and my new life. A word. Father. The man I’d pulled from the sea and breathed life into. The man without memory. And so I saved his life a second time, or Andy did, in act of unmitigated compassion and heroism. He flew to Florida to get my father. Then they rode a plane all the way to Oregon together. Briefly they were detained at the airport security arch because my father would not let go of the faux metal box containing my mother’s ashes. He sat in his wheelchair and gripped them and shook his head no. Finally they let an old man through with what was left of his wife. When Andy brought my father back to me I felt cleaved between two Lidias. A daughter, a tormented and damaged girl. And a woman, a mother, a writer whose life had just been born. Andy and I found an assisted living facility about 20 minutes away from our sanctuary in the Bull Run Wilderness. The rooms were more like apartments than dungeons. His apartment had a giant window through which you could see fir trees and maple and alder - the Northwest. It was something I could give him that didn’t hurt.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  It took six months. The rest of her life. One of the more difficult parts of her hospitalization was her intense withdrawal from alcohol. You will hate my saying this, but it will be true nonetheless. If I hadn’t had Miles, I would have moved back into her house of pain. And I would have brought her a bottle to ease her suffering, her journey. Every day if that’s what it took. But my Miles - there was a deathmother, and there was his life. That is all. When she died I was not with her. I tried to help her during her illness but she had so clusterfucked her life up by then there was almost nothing I could do. Andy and I flew to Florida to see her. To comfort her. To show her Miles. She looked so happy to see the little baby boy with the lifeforce larger than thunderstorm. She said, “Belle, take him - I don’t remember how to hold a baby right.” She said, “A boyah! We’ve never had one a those!” Clapping her hands together and crying. But she had almost no life left in her. Once when I was alone with her in her hospital room, I asked her a question. She looked so small and still. Her face was shrunken and wrinkled, and her body so pale and slight. She almost looked like a girl, except for the lines a sad cartography across her face. I asked her, “What’s the best thing that’s ever happened in your life?” It was the question Kesey had asked me. It’s what I could think to ask. She said, “Oh. Well, Belle. That’s easy. My children.” Though I couldn’t imagine how, I believed her. They called me from a Florida Hospice all the way in Oregon when her skin became ashen and her eyelids began to flutter. They put the phone to her ear. She could not speak, as she had starved herself and hadn’t the energy by then. They said when she heard my voice on the other end her eyes became very wide, and then her breathing became very loud and urgent. Then the nurse took the phone back and told me she was gone, and that she looked peaceful, and that she believed my mother had heard me.

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

  On October 24, 2012, Mamana Bibi, a sixty-five-year-old woman picking vegetables in her family’s large open land in northern Waziristan, Pakistan, was killed by a U.S. drone aircraft. She was not a terrorist but a midwife married to a retired schoolteacher, yet she was blown to pieces in front of her nine young grandchildren. Some of the children have had multiple surgeries that the family could ill afford because they lost all their livestock; the smaller children still scream in terror all night long. We do not know who the real targets were. Yet even though the U.S. government claims to carry out thorough poststrike assessments, it has never apologized, never offered compensation to the family, nor even admitted what happened to the American people. CIA director John O. Brennan had previously claimed that drone strikes caused absolutely no civilian casualties; more recently he has admitted otherwise while maintaining that such deaths are extremely rare. Since then, Amnesty International reviewed some forty-five strikes in the region, finding evidence of unlawful civilian deaths, and has reported several strikes that appear to have killed civilians outside the bounds of law.105 “Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breed more terrorism,” said Bibi’s son. “No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.”106 “Am I my brother’s guardian?” Cain asked after he had killed his brother, Abel. We are now living in such an interconnected world that we are all implicated in one another’s history and one another’s tragedies. As we—quite rightly—condemn those terrorists who kill innocent people, we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died or been mutilated in our modern wars simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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

  One of Bin Laden’s objectives had been to draw Muslims all over the world to his vision of jihad. Though he did become a charismatic folk hero to some—a kind of Saudi Che—in this central mission he ultimately failed. Between 2001 and 2007, a Gallup poll conducted in thirty-five predominantly Muslim countries found that only 7 percent of respondents thought the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified”; for these people, the reasons were entirely political. As for the 93 percent who condemned the attacks, they quoted Quranic verses to show that the killing of innocent people could have no place in Islam.103 One might well wonder how much more unanimously opposed to terror the Muslim world might have become, but for the course the United States and its allies took in the wake of 9/11. At a time when even in Tehran there were demonstrations of solidarity with America, the Bush and Blair coalition lashed out with its own violent rejoinder, a drive that would culminate in the tragically misbegotten Iraq invasion of 2003. Its most decisive result was to present the world with a new set of images of Muslim suffering in which the West was not only implicated but for which it was, this time, directly responsible. When considering the tenacity of al-Qaeda, it is well to remember that such images of Muslim suffering, more than any expansive theory of jihad, were what had drawn so many young Muslims to the camps of Peshawar in the first instance. We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God, but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as “collateral damage.” Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeleine Albright’s when she was still Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations. She later retracted it, but among people all around the world, it has never been forgotten. In 1996, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq was justified: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more than died in Hiroshima.… Is the price worth it?” “I think this is a very hard choice,” Albright replied, “but the price, we think the price is worth it.”104

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry. Poetic language - and by that I mean the language of image, sound, rhythm, color, sensation-is probably the closest we bring language to experience - poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation. So after I name my primal grief, the death of my daughter the day she was born, it felt precise to move directly to poetic language. The metaphor of collecting rocks is more “true” to me to the experience of grieving than to say, I was intolerably sad. It feels precise to draw that metaphor of collecting rocks out, to extend it as long as possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did. It’s my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space. I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body. You could probably go through this book and literally chart the moments of emotional intensity by watching where the language - to quote Dickinson-goes strange. You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role memory plays? While I was writing this book, many things occurred to me about both memory and about the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits - specifically his short-term and a good bit of his long-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and biochemistry. I was trying to deal with the fact that the things he’d done had been “erased” from experience. Part of me didn’t believe it-I’d look at him and think, is the dark side of him still in there? Tucked deeply behind the gray matter?

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Yes, this title came to me long ago-when I was 26! Wait, was I ever 26? Man that seems like epochs ago. I was in a creative writing workshop with the wonderful Diana Abu-Jaber. My daughter had just died, and I was a mess-raging, grieving, self-destructing. But I did manage to make it into that creative writing classroom. I wrote a crazy short story made from seemingly random fragments. Diana looked at the rush of fragments and said Lidia, they all have something in common. Because I was a knownothing, I said, what? Water, she said. She also said, I think this is a book. I think it’s the story of your life, maybe. But at that time I was busy. Busy raging, grieving, fucking up. Later I pulled the story back out and looked at it. You know what? She was right. And I thought, if this is the story of my life, no wonder it’s in fragments. It’s got a messed up chronology because that’s how I feel about life-it’s not linear. It moves in fits and starts, doubles back, repeats or extends an image. I thought if my life has a chronology, it’s the chronology of water - the way water carved the earth, the way water carries us into the world, the way we are made of water, the way water retreats or comes. I had, in other words, with her help, found my central metaphor. That story was eventually published in The Northwest Review, and as you know, all these years later, has become the spine and bones of this book. In my house there are many rocks. What I love about rocks that you find in rivers or at the ocean’s shore is that they are the sediment of all life on the planet continuously destroyed and remade. When you hold a rock in your hand you are holding everything in existence, even space dust, and it’s traveled oceans to get to you. So fragile and yet solid - made from pieces of things - like we are. Writing restored your personal narrative that was not allowed in your father’s house while you were growing up. “My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water.” Does writing provide the same essential to Lidia the adult? Are the reasons you wrote then and now different?