Sadness

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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Dad’s support made it possible for me to go through with the visit, which, though awkward, went better than expected. There’s a lot more to unpack here, and we’ll get to it later on—not surprisingly, in chapter 5, “Grief & Trauma: The Golden Repair.” Looking back, what strikes me now is not so much the memory of meeting my bio dad for the first time but more so Dad’s constant, loving presence throughout this difficult and tension-filled encounter with a man I wasn’t sure wanted anything to do with me. Like always, he had my back. Like always, he made whatever was “not OK” less so. BE GENTLE WITH YOURSELF After silencing the jackhammers, I settled into my parents’ softly lit living room and thought back to eavesdropping on Dad repeating, “It will be OK. I will be OK.” Unbeknownst to me then, these would be some of Dad’s last words. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Will it really be OK? I wondered. I wanted to believe that my dad was right, but sometimes life felt impossible. In addition to Dad dying, I had a whole list of crap that didn’t always feel OK: living with my own stage IV cancer diagnosis for close to half my life, dealing with a global pandemic, watching my business falter as Dad’s health went into steep decline, and managing my depression, which was so familiar it sometimes felt like an annoying friend. The awakening of old traumas and family dramas. And this on top of the social, political, and economic shit show of the last few years. Did I mention perimenopause? Fuck. I was definitely not OK. These stresses were taking a toll (and draining the collagen out of my face). No wonder Dad’s mantra hit me on so many levels. What would it require for me to give that kind of comfort to myself? If I thought I could muscle my way out of my next dark night of the soul, I had another thing coming. BEING OK STARTS WITH ACKNOWLEDGING THAT, IN FACT, YOU ARE NOT OK So often we miss this step or avoid the truth of how we actually are. There’s so much pressure to be grrreat!—happy, wise, and in control—that we have a hard time sitting with our internal reality. Instead, we cover up angst by racing forward, looking for people, things, and solutions outside ourselves—as if we are problems to be fixed. In truth, we are not broken. We do not need fixing. We just need loving. Dad’s path to OK-ness included a kind of self-love that I’d sporadically tried to give myself, ever since my own cancer wake-up call in 2003. He could no longer pretend to be fine. He stopped avoiding difficult conversations for fear of their repercussions. And he refused to ignore his physical and emotional needs.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  All the endless labor and love which pastor and people put into the erection of a new church home may serve only for a few years, and then the location will have to be abandoned and the edifice sold for second-hand building material. The interest of the Church is in stability of population. A permanent location builds up an invaluable “good-will.” People come to love the local church for the memories and traditions which cling about it and make it more beautiful than the ivy on its walls. Churches are long-lived organisms, like trees, and strike their roots deeper with the passing years. When a speculative and frantic commerce hustles the churches around, they owe it no thanks. Competitive industry sweeps the people together in the great cities. Therewith it creates the problem of the down-town church. In a community of moderate diameter the people on the outskirts can easily reach a church built in the centre. When a city grows very large, the outer fringe of homes drifts ever farther away from the ancient churches that stand in heroic loneliness like the Roman soldier dying on guard at Pompeii. Their problem is aggravated by land speculation, which usually lays a belt of sparsely settled land about the city and compels home-seekers to cross that belt to nuclei of social life still farther out. These brief suggestions will suffice to show that at the bottom of some of the gravest problems that harass churches and pastors lies the land question in its relation to the complex total of modern life. The condition of the crowded and landless people ought long ago to have aroused the Church to examine the moral basis of our land system. Let it realize in addition that its own growth and stability is impaired by the same causes. The Church and its income The income of the Church in former times and in other countries was mainly derived from landed wealth or from state subsidies. In our country the churches with few exceptions are maintained by the current contributions of their living members. It is therefore of the utmost importance to the financial welfare of the churches that their members shall have a regular and secure income, from which they can readily support their church. Thus the Church has the greatest possible interest in a just and even distribution of wealth. The best community for church support at present is a comfortable middle-class neighborhood. A social system which would make moderate wealth approximately universal would be the best soil for robust churches. If, on the contrary, society tends to divide into a few rich families and a mass of poor wage-earners, the troubles of the Church are before it. We all understand that a man receiving $500 a year cannot pay as much to religious institutions as a man receiving $5000, but the universal impression seems to be that he can fairly be expected to contribute the same proportion of his income.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  One day Maria moved from Chicago and showed up, tearful, on my doorstep with just her black cat Boo-Boo and a box filled with the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. She had left Maeve, she said, because Maeve was such a heartbreaker, an intriguer, a Donna Juanna, an Irish drunk, charming and incorrigible. We sat at my kitchen table, which had a metal top printed to look like grainy wood and a hanging lamp above it cozily dimmed by a shade of gathered brown fabric, left behind by the previous tenant. We drank red wine and ate lasagna and talked and smoked and listened to Manon Lescaut. Maria had given up on Chicago. She’d never go back to its cold winds blasting off the lake, its comfortable, defeated, hard-driven lesbians, its big, underfurnished apartments. She talked with scorn of her affair with Maeve. “It was so humiliating, the broken promises, the tearful reproaches and steamy reconciliations, those drunken fights in bars, midnight phone calls, hurtling back and forth in cars on snow chains. All the hours of gossip with friends, of sympathy from other women—oh, I’m sick of it, sick of it!” She laughed through her tears, her shoulders shaking with sobs or merriment, I couldn’t tell which. My grungy little apartment’s three windows gave onto a narrow alley noisy with flapping laundry that by day projected silhouettes like black wings on our yellow shades. The bathroom, the most recent addition, had a tub so small that you washed with your knees around your chin. The sink had been designed for a dirty child. The outer halls, painted with a shiny glaze, smelled of roach spray and were lit by bare bulbs. Our place you entered through the kitchen. On one side was the room I gave Maria that also housed Boo-Boo’s bed—the empty Britannica box. On the other side was my room, the living room with a couch that pulled out. There I kept my Chinese flashcards in long boxes in anticipation of the day when I’d resume my studies; that day has never come. Maria had a bright red loden coat that she wore with black Wellington boots and a black scarf. Dressed that way she’d accompany me to the Bleecker Street Tavern and the basement Italian restaurants. She tried to show an interest in New York, and her conversation willed itself toward enthusiasm by the frequent use of such words as “fascinating” and “wonderfully bizarre,” but her eyes looked as cold as two holes cut in the ice for fishing.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  8 A bribe is like a bright, precious stone in the eyes of its owner; Wherever he turns, he prospers. 9 He who covers and forgives an offense seeks love, But he who repeats or gossips about a matter separates intimate friends. 10 A reprimand goes deeper into one who has understanding and a teachable spirit Than a hundred lashes into a fool. [Is 32:6 ] 11 A rebellious man seeks only evil; Therefore a cruel messenger will be sent against him. 12 Let a man meet a [ferocious] bear robbed of her cubs Rather than the [angry, narcissistic] fool in his folly. [Hos 13:8 ] 13 Whoever returns evil for good, Evil will not depart from his house. [Ps 109:4 , 5 ; Jer 18:20 ] 14 The beginning of strife is like letting out water [as from a small break in a dam; first it trickles and then it gushes]; Therefore a abandon the quarrel before it breaks out and tempers explode. 15 He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the righteous Are both repulsive to the LORD . [Ex 23:7 ; Prov 24:24 ; Is 5:23 ] 16 Why is there money in the hand of a fool to buy wisdom, When he has no common sense or even a heart for it? 17 A friend loves at all times, And a brother is born for adversity. 18 A man lacking common sense gives a pledge And becomes guarantor [for the debt of another] in the presence of his neighbor. 19 He who loves transgression loves strife and is quarrelsome; He who [proudly] raises his gate seeks destruction [because of his arrogant pride]. 20 He who has a crooked mind finds no good, And he who is perverted in his language falls into evil. [James 3:8 ] 21 He who becomes the parent of a fool [who is spiritually blind] does so to his sorrow, And the father of a fool [who is spiritually blind] has no joy. 22 A happy heart is good medicine and a joyful mind causes healing, But a broken spirit dries up the bones. [Prov 12:25 ; 15:13 , 15 ] 23 A wicked man receives a bribe from the [hidden] pocket To pervert the ways of justice. 24 [Skillful and godly] wisdom is in the presence of a person of understanding [and he recognizes it], But the eyes of a [thickheaded] fool are on the ends of the earth. 25 A foolish son is a grief and anguish to his father And bitterness to her who gave birth to him. 26 It is also not good to fine the righteous, Nor to strike the noble for their uprightness. 27 He who has knowledge restrains and is careful with his words, And a man of understanding and wisdom has a cool spirit (self-control, an even temper).

• From Vox (1992)

  I need this. I’d spend twenty dollars a minute for this. And there isn’t a time limit on this line, either—at least my ad says NO TIME LIMIT in big letters.” “Okay,” she said. “Okay, and in return for your indulgence, I’m going to try to do something with your heirlooms there, on your dining-room table. Let me see. All right, once there was a guy who had a big party, a big dinner party for a dozen people, which really wasn’t his style, but he did it anyway, and when all of his friends had left, he began cleaning up, feeling slightly depressed. He took the plates in, the glasses in, the cutlery in, man, he’d never seen the basket in his dishwasher so stuffed with silverware. He jammed the last fork in, but in his impatience to close the dishwasher door and go to bed, he didn’t check that the fork was all the way in the basket, and as it happened it was not, because the forks were so tightly squeezed in there that he would have really had to work it down for it to stay put. This was one of the older-style dishwashers, and when that fork was tossed aloft by the first powerful spray of water up from the impeller, it fell, and it happened to fall so that it was caught dangling somehow between a plate and the little loop on the handle of a saucepan, with the points up, and the handle dangling far enough down that the sprayer in the bottom swung into it at full speed and notched it, and made it swing up again but not completely out of the way, and so it swung down into the path of the sprayer thing again and again, and got very messed up, and by the time this guy was able to get back to the kitchen and turn off the dishwasher, which sounded awful, the fork was badly injured.

• From Vox (1992)

  There was another sound of ice cubes. She said, “It’s just that I really liked him. Vain bum. We went dancing one night, and I made the mistake of suggesting to him as we were on the dance floor that maybe he should take his pen out of his shirt pocket and put it in his back pocket. And that was it, he never called me again.” “That little scum-twirler! Tell me his address, I’ll fade him out, I’ll rip his arms off.” “No. I got over it. Anyway, that wasn’t what I meant to talk about. I just mean I was here in my wonderfully orderly apartment after dinner and I saw this big joke of a stereo system and I switched it on, and the sky got darker and all the little red and green lights on the receiver were like ocean buoys or something, and I started to feel what you’d expect, sad, happy, resigned, horny, some combination of all of them, and I felt suddenly that I’d been virtuous for long enough and probably should definitely masturbate, and I thought wait, let’s not just have a perfunctory masturbation session, Abby, let’s do something just a little bit special tonight, to round out a special day, right? So I brought out a copy of Forum that I rather bravely bought one day a while ago. But I’d read all the stories and all the letters and it just wasn’t working. So I started looking at the ads, really almost for the first time. And there was this headline: ANYTIME AT ALL.” “MAKE IT HAPPEN.” “That’s right. And I like the sound of the pauses in long-distance conversations—the cassette hiss sound. And yet I didn’t really want to talk to anyone I knew. So that’s more or less why I called.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Do men no longer spill the blood of men for their ambition and the sweat of men for their greed?” As the Spirit of the Nineteenth Century listened, his head sank to his breast. “Your shame is already upon me. My great cities are as yours were. My millions live from hand to mouth. Those who toil longest have least. My thousands sink exhausted before their days are half spent. My human wreckage multiplies. Class faces class in sullen distrust. Their freedom and knowledge has only made men keener to suffer. Give me a seat among you, and let me think why it has been so.” The others turned to the Spirit of the First Century, “Your promised redemption is long in coming.” “But it will come,” he replied. The industrial revolution Man has always suffered want and the fear of want. His dangers have always come from two sources,—nature and man. Drought or flood, locusts or wild beasts, swept away his crops or herds. Earthquake and fire shook his home to ruin or ate up in the flare of an hour the toil of a lifetime. But there is a disciplining power in the adversities of nature. If man wrestles bravely with her, she will turn to bless him and make him more a man. By learning nature’s laws and obeying them, he makes nature obey him. The really grinding and destructive enemy of man is man. The roaming savage in famine and superstition hunted and ate his enemy as he hunted the beast. When men settled down to till the fields, they captured prisoners and made them drudge for them as slaves, just as they domesticated the horse and ox and made them work. Strong peoples conquered the weak and exacted forced labor or rent for the use of the land which the serf had once owned. Exploitation has changed its form from one stage of society to another, but it has always existed. “From the beginning until now man has divided his fellows into those who were to be fed and those who were, figuratively at least, to be eaten.” There has always been social misery. The pyramids of Egypt were built on it; the Roman roads were cemented with it. But to-day we face a new form of it, which affronts all just conceptions of human life in new and peculiar ways. Modern poverty, strangely enough, began when man for the first time in history began to escape from poverty. The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789 were the birth of modern democracy. But about the same time another revolution set in beside which these great events were puny. In 1769 James Watt harnessed the expansive power of steam for human use. Hitherto man had used only the localized power of falling water and the fitful power of blowing wind. The only ready force had been the vital energy of man and beast.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She nodded her long head and looked up to the ceiling, with the compassionate eyes of a grandmother who ruins herself on toys. Her guest partook of none of her potions. Some sort of physical sense of honour still survived in him, and his disdain for drugs was akin to his distaste for brothels. For a number of days - he had kept no count of them - he had found his way to this black hole, presided over by an attendant Norn. Ungraciously, and in terms that brooked no argument, he had paid for her food, coffee, and her own liqueurs, and for his personal requirements in the way of cigarettes, fruit, ice, and soft drinks. He had commanded his slave to buy the sumptuous Japanese robe, scents, and expensive soaps. She was moved less by desire for money than by the pleasure of acting as an accomplice. She devoted herself to Cheri with enthusiasm, a revival of her old zeal as a missionary of vice who, with garrulous and culpable alacrity, would divest and bathe a virgin, cook an opium pellet, and pour out intoxicating spirits or ether. This apostolate was fruitless, for her singular guest brought back no paramour, drank soft drinks only, stretched himself on the dusty divan, and delivered only one word of command:* Talk.’ She did talk, following, she believed, her own fancies; but, now brutally, now subtly, he would direct the muddied meanderings of her reminiscences. She talked like a sewing-woman who comes in by the day, with the continuous, stupefying monotony of creatures whose days are given over to long and sedentary tasks. But she never did any sewing, for she had the aristocratic unpracticalness of a former prostitute. While talking, she would pin a pleat over a hole or stain, and take up again the business of tarot cards and patience She would put on gloves to grind coffee bought by the charwoman, and then handle greasy cards without turning a hair. She talked, and Cheri listened to her soporific voice and the shuffle of her felted slippers. He reclined at ease, magnificently robed, in the ill-kempt lodging. His guardian dared ask no questions. She knew enough: he was a monomaniac, as his abstemiousness proved. The illness for which she was ministering was mysterious; but it was an illness. She risked asking in, as though from a sense of duty, a very pretty young woman, childish and professionally gay. Cheri paid her neither more nor less attention than he would a puppy, and said to the Pal, * Are we going to have any more of your fashionable parties? * She did not require snubbing a second time, and he never had cause to bind her to secrecy. One day she almost hit upon the simple truth, when she proposed asking in two or three of her friends of the good old days; Lea, for instance. He never batted an eyelid.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He wanted to go on and glanced at Lea. She was still ready to listen. Sitting bolt upright now, she exposed to him in the full light her noble face in its disarray, the skin shining like wax where the hot tears had dried. Her cheeks and chin were pulled down by an invisible weight, and this added a look of sadness to the trembling corners of her mouth. Cheri found intact amidst this wreckage of beauty the lovely commanding nose and the eyes as blue as a blue flower. ‘And so you see, Nounoune, after months of that sort of life, I come back here, and ...’ He pulled himself up, frightened by what he had nearly said. ‘You come back here, and find an old woman,’ Lea said calmly, in a whisper. ‘NounouneI Listen, Nounoune!’ He threw himself on his knees beside her, looking like a guilty, tongue-tied child no longer able to hide his misdemeanour. ‘And you find an old woman,* Lea repeated. ‘So what are you afraid of, child? ’ She put her arms round his shoulders, and felt his body rigid and resistant, in sympathy with the hurt she was suffering. ‘ Come, cheer up, my Cheri. Don’t cry, my pretty. ... What is it you’re afraid of? Of having hurt me? Far from it: I feel so grateful to you.’ He gave a sob of protestation, finding no strength to gainsay her. She put her cheek against his tousled black hair. ‘Did you say all that, did you really think all that of me? Was I really so lovely in your eyes, tell me? And so kind? At the age when a woman’s life is so often over, was I really the loveliest for you, the most kind, and were you really in love with me? How grateful I am to you, my darling! The finest, did you say? ... My poor child.’ He let himself go, while she supported him in her arms. * Had I really been the finest, I should have made a man of you, and not thought only of the pleasures of your body, and my own happiness. The finest! Oh, no, my darling, I certainly wasn’t that, since I kept you to myself. And now it’s almost too late. ...’ He seemed to be asleep in Lea’s arms; but his obstinately tight-shut eyelids quivered incessantly, and with one lifeless hand he was clutching hold of her negligee and slowly tearing it. ‘It’s almost too late, it’s almost too late. But all the same ...’ She eaned over him. ‘Listen to me, my darling. Wake up, my pretty, and listen to me with your eyes open. Don’t be afraid of looking at me. I am, after all, the woman you were in love with, you know, the finest woman ...’ He opened his eyes, and his first tearful glance was already filled with a selfish, mendicant hope.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I recently learned a story about an actress named Suzanne Smith, who died at age 45 after living with breast cancer for 20 years. Suzanne was adamantly opposed to having these conversations with her loved ones. Weeks before she died, if someone brought up the word hospice, God help them. True to her spirit, in her death and in her life, she was a spitfire. Even after Suzanne was in hospice and had what is known as “the death rattle,” a sign that death is imminent, she managed to eke out, “I . . . want . . . to . . . live.” And she did, for two more days. That may not sound like a lot, but given her condition, the nurses assured her family that it was nothing short of remarkable. When someone is dying, we have to respect and even celebrate not only their desires but who they are. One way or another, they will let you know what they need. With Carole’s expert help, the next time I saw my dad, I sat down with a wad of tissues bundled in my pocket and said, “I’d like to talk to you about how to talk about death, Dad. I want to do this as best as I can, but I’m probably going to be awkward, fearful, and, at times, tearful. Is this something you’d still like to do?” “I’d like that very much, love. I don’t have many people I can talk to about this, and it’s on my mind a lot these days. To be honest, it can be quite lonely.” I started by asking him if there was anything he wanted to experience before he died. “I want to have a little fun every day.” A game of gin rummy would suffice, he said. After a pause, I ventured further. “Are you scared, Dad?” “Not really. I’m just sad to leave. I want to know how all your stories are going to unfold.” Who his brother’s grandkids would marry. Where Brian and I would move. What Mom would plant in the garden that spring. It’s easy to shut down conversations like this because we’re afraid to get them wrong or to be seen as a downer or negative. “Let’s talk about something nice. You’re going to be fine,” we say. But maybe they’ll never be fine again, and not talking about that possibility isn’t fine, either. Addressing the elephant in the room gave Dad palpable relief. Talking about what was on his mind allowed him to feel less alone. It cleared space for us to find joy in the simple everyday moments that remained. Knowing Dad felt less alone made me feel less alone, too, not to mention more present with him, which is what I’d wanted all along. And oh, the gin rummy we played.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Caring for myself is an act of survival. — AUDRE LORDE Self-care is usually the first thing to fall by the wayside when we’re in crisis. We’re taking care of our family, friends, career, home, pets, finances, community, and more. Oftentimes we’re last on the list. And if, by some chance, we’re able to carve out a wee bit of space for ourselves, we may not know where to start or what to do. Perhaps it’s been so long since we’ve filled our own tank it feels impossible. Why bother? Here’s why: because when we’re not OK, self-care is exactly what we need. In difficult times, you’re inevitably going to be more depleted, which means it’s important to be intentional about how you use and replenish your energy. Nurturing yourself, in even the smallest ways, will help you become more stress-hardy. But I know this is easier said than done. As we delve into the topic of self-care, allow me to point out the obvious: For more than two decades, I’ve made my living as an internationally known wellness expert. If there’s one thing I know, it’s the ins and outs of self-care. But when crisis hits, what we know goes flying out the window. At various rupture points, I’d find myself passing up a walk in nature, opting to stay completely glued to my phone, doom scrolling or devouring celebrity gossip. Or zoning out with endless TV and eating cereal for dinner (more nights than I’d like to admit). During these times, my connection to self was nowhere to be found. Sound familiar? In this chapter, I’m going to walk you through some essential self-care basics. (Clearly, I could use a reminder, too.) But let’s get one thing clear: no one is expecting you to embark on a full-blown lifestyle makeover. Setting the bar that high is not only a recipe for burnout, it will likely backfire. Instead, just let my words soak in. When you’re ready, I encourage you to choose one simple action you can take to help yourself feel better. Just one. After you’ve got some consistency under your belt, add another. Above all, let it be easy. You’re already doing enough hard stuff. This is meant to nourish you, not send you over the edge. DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO For me, cleaning is a contact sport. When life feels groundless, I grab some Windex and wipe the shit out of it. Cleaning with gusto makes me feel accomplished. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end. No mystery. No uncertainty. No “better luck next time.” Only a satisfying sense of completion. The floor was dirty. The floor is now clean. Cue the trumpets! A year after Dad died, I decided that my staycation was the perfect time to “tackle” my back-burner to-do list. Not the doctors’ appointments I’d neglected to make or the teeth cleaning that was long overdue.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  It is profoundly pathetic to see how a people paralyzed, broken on the rack, and almost destroyed, still clung to its national existence and believed in its political future. Even the crudest dreams of apocalypticism have a tragic dignity and a lingering touch of vital force. In those dreams the Jewish people kept alive both their memories and their hopes much as an impoverished aristocratic family will preserve the tarnished swords and the faded uniforms worn by illustrious ancestors and nurse the hope in its sons that they may some day regain the old position. But it is a mistake to look for political wisdom in a people that had no politics. Bands of foreign political refugees gathered in England have often dreamed intensely of the liberation of their fatherland, but they have rarely planned wisely, and usually fail to take account of changes since they left their home. Yet the unhistorical and artificial schemes of apocalypticism have been and are now more influential in shaping the imagination of Christian men about the future course of history than the inspired thoughts of the great prophets. Men still rival the rabbis in learned calculations that somehow never turn out correct, and follow wandering lights which have thus far disappointed and led astray all that have ever followed them. The “pessimism” of the prophets Social preachers nowadays are very commonly charged with being “too pessimistic.” The same charge was made against the Hebrew prophets. Their people, like ours, was filled full of cheerful and egotistic optimism, with this distinction in favor of the Hebrews, that their optimism was based on religious faith, while ours is based mainly on material wealth. Israel had the strongest of all the gods for its champion, and he would surely see his people through all trouble. Was not Israel his dwelling-place and did not his people supply him with the sacrifices which he loved? It is significant that Amos first appeared at a festival at Bethel and interrupted its revels with a jarring note, crying that the fall of the Northern kingdom and the exile of its people were impending. These prophets continued to be disturbers of religious pleasure. To the people this seemed not only unpatriotic and disagreeable pessimism, but treason and blasphemy combined, for the nation and Jehovah were one, and the downfall of the one implied the downfall of the other. Amos came close to denying that Israel had any special religious prerogative at all. As Amos and Hosea proclaimed the doom of the Northern kingdom in the eighth century, Jeremiah proclaimed the fall of the Southern kingdom a century and a half later. After the great reformation under Josiah (623 b.c. ), the people were full of confidence. They had the temple; they had the Law. Jeremiah called their faith a delusion. Their temple would suffer the same fate as the ancient sanctuary of Shiloh. He denied that Judah was any better than the sister-kingdom had been.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  To learn new ways to express ourselves and our needs. Yay! (Just what you wanted.) This chapter, filled with tips and real-world scenarios, is meant to help both people who are grieving as well as those who love and care for them. My hope is that we all emerge feeling a little more prepared, a little less awkward, and a lot more forgiving—of ourselves and each other. I KNOW YOU MEAN WELL, BUT . . . Don’t be surprised if people do or say weird, totally confounding shit when your world falls apart. These well-meaning folks are often referred to as “grief illiterate.” This doesn’t mean they’re jerks (although it may feel like it in the moment); it just means that they’re inexperienced in handling the big emotions that accompany life’s scary moments. As we’ve well established, none of us were taught how to survive storms of this magnitude. You likely didn’t know how to, either, before this sad, bad, mad, exhausting thing happened, and then it was trial by cancer, divorce, death, or some other flavor of crisis. Let’s be real, it’s frickin’ hard to know what to do or say when someone you love is in pain. It’s also hard to know and ask for what you need when you’re the one who’s struggling. And because this rocky terrain is rarely traversed, it’s easy to slip and unintentionally do or say insensitive things. In my first book, Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips, I called the unconscious (and often insanely inappropriate) things people would say “cancer faux pas.” Stuff like, How long do you have to live? or My cousin got that and died. Super comforting (and absurd), right? Well, grief faux pas are just as common, if not more so. Pain has the power to turn us into Pez dispensers of tactless behavior. We fidget, fumble, and vomit out words that are never supposed to go together, because we’re wildly insecure and uncomfortable. A sample of grief-illiterate comments follows. Feel free to play along at home, adding any you might have heard, as well: He’s in a better place now . . . (A better place is with me!) It’s God’s plan . . . (The God you’re talking about sounds like a psychopath.) You’re young; you’ll have another baby . . . (I want this baby!) Aren’t you over it yet? It’s been months, years, decades . . . (I’m sorry I’m not as bounce back–y as you. There’s no over; there’s only through.) At least she lived a long life . . . (There is no such thing as “at least” in grief.) There’s a reason for everything . . . (Excuse me while I vomit in my mouth.) He really brought this on himself (smoked, drank, ate sausage, didn’t call his mother on Sundays) . . . (Fault and blame are toxic. Please don’t.) I know exactly how you feel . . . (No, you don’t.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She lay back, her lips parted, looking at him through half-closed eyes. He saw a gleam of the candid, calculating, uncharacteristically feminine expression that a woman bestows on the man who is going to pleasure her, and it shocked his unavowable chastity. From his superior position he returned this look with another - the uncommunicative, enigmatic look of the man who prefers to abstain. Not wishing to move away, he simply looked towards the golden daylight, the freshness of the watered garden, and the blackbirds, weaving liquid sequences of sound round the dry incessant chirps of the sparrows. Edmee could see signs of emaciation and prolonged fatigue on his features. His cheeks were blue with a day’s growth of beard. She noticed that his fine hands were not clean, that his finger-nails had not been near soap and water since the previous evening, and that the dark lines which accentuated the hollows under his eyes were now spreading, in the shape of crow’s feet, towards his nose. This handsome young man—she decided — without collar or shoes, looked ravaged, as if he had had to spend a night in prison. Without losing his looks, he had shrunk in accordance with some.mysterious scaling down, and this enabled her to regain the upper hand. She no longer invited him to join her, sat up in bed, and put a hand on his forehead. ‘111?’ Slowly he let his attention wander back from the garden to his wife. ‘What? ... No, no, nothing’s wrong with me, except I’m sleepy. So sleepy that I can hardly bring myself to go to bed — if you know what I mean. ...’ He smiled, showing dry gums and lips colourless on the insides. But, above all, this smile betrayed a sadness that sought no remedy, modest as a poor man’s suffering. Edmee was on the point of questioning him categorically, but then thought better of it. ‘ Get into bed,’ she ordered, making room for him. ‘Bed? It’s water I need. I feel so filthy, it fust isn’t true.’ He just had the strength to lift up a water-bottle, take a gulp from the neck, then throw off his coat, before he fell back like a log on the bed, and lay there without moving again, drained by sleep.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  to meet Hugo. I let him kiss me. I promise to come and see him Monday. I am weak. But I don’t want to hurt his life, maim him, deprive him of his newborn self-confidence. Enough of my old love for him survives for that. I warned him that I could destroy him, although I hated to destroy, and that I had found a man I couldn’t destroy, that he was the right man for me. I tried to make him hate me. But he said, “I want you, Anaïs.” And the horoscope says: we are complements. The important thing is the response to life. June and Henry respond extravagantly, as I do. Hugo is dimmer, more listless. Today he came out of the dimness to a realization of The Possessed. I made him write down his thoughts, they were so wonderful. His best moments are very profound. He represents truth. He is Shatov, capable of love and faith. Then what am I? That Friday, when I lay in three men’s arms, what was I? To Eduardo: “Listen, cousin chéri , I’m writing you in the train, going home. I am trembling with pain over this morning. The day seemed so heavy to me I couldn’t breathe. . . . You have been beautiful with activity, life, emotion, strength. It is a tragedy for me that you should be at your highest moment when I love you best, only not sensually, not sensually. We are destined never to meet with equal feelings. Just now it is Henry who owns my body. Cousin chéri , I tried today for the last time to direct life, according to an ideal. My ideal was to wait for you all my life, and I waited too long, and now I live by instinct, and the flow carries me to Henry. Forgive me. It isn’t that you haven’t the strength to hold me. Would you say that you didn’t love me before because I was less lovable? No. It would be as untrue to say you lacked the strength as to say I have changed. Life is not rational; it is just mad and full of pain. Today I have not seen Henry nor will I see him tomorrow. I give these two days to the memory of our hours. Be a fatalist, yes, as I am today but have no mean or bitter thoughts such as the idea that I played with you for my vanity’s sake. Oh, Eduardo, querido , I accept pain which comes not from such motives but from real sources—real pain, at the treachery of life, which hurts us both in different ways. Do not seek the because —in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘You want to know too much. Simply have my trunks brought down, and give my fur rugs a good beating.’ ‘ Madame will be taking the motor-car? ’ ‘I think so. I’m sure of it, in fact. I’ll need all my creature comforts now, Rose. Just think of it, this time I’m going all on my own. It’s going to be a pleasure trip.’ During the next five days Lea rushed all over Paris; wrote, telegraphed, and received telegrams and answers from the south. And she said goodbye to Paris, leaving behind a short letter addressed to Madame Peloux which she started no less than three times: My dear Charlotte, You llforgive me if I go away without saying goodbye to you, and keep my little secret to myself. I'm making a perfect fool ofmyself... and why noti Ids a short life, leds make it .a gay one. I send you an affectionate kiss. Remember me to the child when he comes back. Your incorrigible Lea. P.S. — Don t trouble to come and interview my butler or concierge no member of my household knows anything at all about it. '"I—"vo you know, my adored treasure, I don’t think you’re I ■ looking very well.* JL-*/ ‘It’s the night in the train,’ Cheri answered shortly. Madame Peloux did not dare to say just what she thought. She found her son changed. “He’s ... yes, he’s sinister!” she decided; and she ended by exclaiming enthusiastically, ‘It’s Italy!’ ‘If you like,’ Ch£ri conceded. Mother and son had just finished breakfasting together, and Ch£ri had condescended to praise with an oath his cup of‘housemaid’s coffee ’, made with creamy milk, well sugared, slowly reheated, with buttered toast crumbled into it and browned till it formed a succulent crust. He felt cold in his white woollen pyjamas and was clasping his knees to his chest. Charlotte Peloux, anxious to look pretty for her son, had put on a brand-new marigold negligee, and a boudoir-cap fitting tight across the forehead. This made her face stand out, bare and macabre. Finding her son’s eye fixed upon her, she simpered: ‘You see, I’ve adopted the grandmother style. Very soon, I’ll powder my hair. Do you like this cap? Rather eighteenth century, don’t you think? Dubarry or Pompadour? How do I look in it?* ‘Like an old convict,’ Cheri said witheringly. ‘Next time you must run up a warning signal.’ She groaned, then shrieked with laughter: ‘Ha-ha-ha. You’ve a sharp tongue in your head and no mistake! ’ But he did not laugh. He was staring out at the lawn powdered with snow after last night’s fall. His nervous state was visible only in the spasmodic twitching of his jaw muscles. Madame Peloux was intimidated. She, too, was silent. The faint tinkle of a bell sounded. ‘That’s Edmee, ringing for her breakfast,’ said Madame Peloux. Cheri did not answer. ‘ What’s wrong with the heating? It’s freezing in here!’ he said a moment later.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He found himself out of doors, dressed for the street and hardly conscious of having put on his soft hat and light raincoat. Behind him lay the drawing-room, misty with tobacco smoke; the overpowering scent of women and flowers; the cyanide smell of cherry brandy. There he had left Edmee, Doctor Arnaud, Filipesco, Atkins, and the two Kelekian girls, well-connected young women who, having done a little mild lorry-driving during the war, had no use now for anything but cigars, motors, and their garage-hand friends. He had left Desmond sitting between a real estate merchant and an Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce, together with an invalided poet and Charlotte Peloux. Also a fashionable young married couple, who had obviously been put wise. Throughout dinner they had looked greedy but prudish, with a knowing expression and a simple-minded eagerness to be shocked - as though expecting Cheri to dance stark naked, or Charlotte and the Under-Secretary to make violent love to one another in the middle of the carpet. Cheri had made off, aware that his behaviour had been stoical, with no other lapse than a sudden loss of interest in the present: an awkward thing to lose in the middle of a meal. Even so, his trance could have lasted little more than a moment, had been instantaneous, like a dream. But now he was putting a distance between himself and the strangers who thronged his house, and the sound of his footfall on the sand was as light as the soft padding of an animal. His light silver-grey coat shaded into the mist that had fallen over the Bois; and a few nocturnal loiterers must have envied a young man who was in such a hurry to go nowhere in particular. He was haunted by the vision of his crowded house. He could still hear the sound of voices, and carried with him the memory of faces, of smiles, and especially of the shape of mouths. An elderly man had talked about the war; a woman abouf politics. He remembered, too, the new understanding between Desmond and Edmee, and the interest his wife had taken in some building scheme. “Desmond! ... Just the husband for my wife! ” And then, dancing ... the strange effect of the tango on Charlotte Peloux. Cheri quickened his step. The night was filled with the damp mist of a too early autumn and the full moon was shrouded. A great milky halo, ringed with a pallid iridescence, had replaced the planet, and was sometimes itself hidden by fitful puffs of scudding cloud. The smell of September was already in the leaves that had fallen during the dog days. “How mild it is,” Cheri thought.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  As I was helping Dad bring their luggage upstairs to our guest room, he paused to catch his breath and drop a wisdom bomb while he was at it. “You know, love, sometimes the golden years are for shit.” Oh sweet Jesus, here we go. “Look at this bag,” he said, pointing to a small suitcase. “You know what’s in it? Medications! This entire bag is filled with our pills. Everyone works so hard so things can be better later , but we’ve got it all backward. You have to live your life now , love. Make now your golden years. Slow down and give yourself more of the good stuff along the way. Sometimes I worry that you’re following in my footsteps and missing too many of the moments that matter.” His words hit me hard. Not only could I feel his regret, but there was a reason he was saying this to me. As one of the few people who really knew how I was wired, he was highlighting the code I hadn’t yet cracked, the one I was uncomfortable discussing, even with him. There was only one way to respond. DEAD MOUSE! That’s right. When a sudden onset of feelings triggers a tidal wave of overwhelm, sadness, or regret, one of the ways I dam them up is by conjuring awful images in my mind, stuff like eating anchovies or, say, a dead mouse in my sink. (It’s a useful technique. You’re welcome.) Dead mouse, dead mouse, dead mouse! . . . Distraction created, crisis averted. At least temporarily. While my mind games may seem odd, we humans are wired weird for good reason. In psychology, there’s a theory known as mortality salience . It suggests that when our evolutionary drive to survive collides with our inevitable realization that we will all eventually die, we freak the fuck out. Terror ensues. And because terror is, well, terrifying, we develop clever ways to distract ourselves from it. There are millions of ways to divert attention from this terror—buy a midlife-crisis sports car, get your helicopter mom pilot’s license, hoover all the Ho Hos in a threestate radius, the list goes on and on. But my tried-and-true diversion remains two syllables long: Dead mouse! TICK. TICK. BOOM! In October of 2018, Dad’s cancer returned, and technically, it wasn’t a recurrence; it was a new diagnosis of pancreatic cancer—as if lightning had struck twice in the same frickin’ place. Within days, he was back at the hospital for another surgery, followed a few months later by more chemo.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The agent of the street-car company promptly called on the family and offered $100 in settlement of all damages. I saw the manager on their behalf. He explained courteously that since the case resulted in death, $5000 would be the maximum allowed by New York laws, and since the man’s earnings had been small and he had but few years of earning capacity before him, the amount of damage allowed by the courts in his case would be slight. The suffering to the affections of the family did not enter into the legal aspect of the matter. The company paid its counsel by the year. If the family sued and was successful in the lower court, the manager frankly said they would carry it to the higher courts and could wear out the resources of the family at slight expense to the corporation. The president, a benevolent and venerable-looking gentleman, explained to me that the combined distance travelled by their cars daily would reach from New York to the Rocky Mountains. People were constantly being run over, and the company could not afford to be more generous. The widow concluded to submit to the terms offered. The $100 was brought to her in the usual form of single dollar bills to make it look like vast wealth to a poor person. The daughter suffered very serious organic injury through the shock received when her father had disappeared from the hospital, and this was probably one cause for her death in child-birth several years later. The officers of the hospitals and the officers of the street railway company were not bad men. Their point of view and their habits of mind are entirely comprehensible. I feel no certainty that I should not act in the same way if I had been in their place long enough. But the impression remained that our social machinery is almost as blindly cruel as its steel machinery, and that it runs over the life of a poor man with scarcely a quiver. There is certainly a great and increasing body of chronic wretchedness in our wonderful country. It is greatest where our industrial system has worked out its conclusions most completely. Our national optimism and conceit ought not to blind us longer to the fact. Single cases of unhappiness are inevitable in our frail human life; but when there are millions of them, all running along well-defined grooves, reducible to certain laws, then this misery is not an individual, but a social matter, due to causes in the structure of our society and curable only by social reconstruction. We point with pride to the multitude of our charitable organizations. Our great cities have annual directories of their charitable organizations, which state the barest abstract of facts and yet make portly volumes. These institutions are the pride and the shame of Christian civilization; the pride because we so respond to the cry of suffering; the shame, because so much need exists.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  During the same period we can watch the slow develop- ment of a new class, which has been called the fourth estate : the city working class, the wage-workers. They form a dis- tinct class, all living without capital merely by the sale of their labor, working and living under similar physical and social conditions everywhere, with the same economic interests and the same points of view. They present a fairly homo- geneous body and if any section of the people forms a "class," they do. The massing of labor in the factories since the in- troduction of power machinery has brought them into close contact with one another. Hard experience has taught them how helpless they are when they stand alone. They have 404 CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS begun to realize their solidarity and the divergence of their interests from those of the employers. They have begun to organize and are slowly learning to act together. The spread of education and cheap literature, the ease of communica- tion, and the freedom of public meeting have rapidly created a common body of ideas and points of view among them. V The modem " labor movement " is the upward movement of this class. It began with local and concrete issues that pressed upon a given body of workingmen some demand for shorter hours or better wages, some grievance about fines or docking. The trades-unions were formed as defensive or- ganizations for collective action. It is quite true that they have often been foolish and tyrannical in their demands, and headstrong and even lawless in their actions ; but if we con- sider the insecurity and narrowness of the economic existence of the working people, and the glaring contrast between the meagre reward for their labor and the dazzling returns given to invested capital, it is impossible to deny that they have good cause for making a strenuous and continuous fight for better conditions of life. If Christian men are really in- terested in the salvation of human lives and in the health, the decency, the education, and the morality of the people, they must wish well to the working people in their effort to secure such conditions for themselves and their dear ones that they will not have to die of tuberculosis in their prime, nor feel their strength ground down by long hours of work, • nor see their women and children drawn into the merciless hopper of factory labor, nor be shut out from the enjoyment of the culture about them which they have watered with their sweat. But the labor movement means more than better wages WHAT TO DO 405