Tag: grief
Why I try to never say "I know *exactly* how you feel."
I've been on both sides of this comment.
REVIEW: Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, Ten Years Later
Ten years after its release, I revisit Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, an album about his late mother's mental illness, abandonment, and grief, that's held up a clear, honest mirror to my own life. I trace how Stevens' songwriting about Carrie evolved from anger on Michigan and Illinois to unconditional forgiveness, dig into the many alternate versions of 'Fourth of July,' and reproduce my very first attempt at music criticism: a Carrie and Lowell review I wrote as a teenager back in 2015.
Every Ten Years
July 8. Sunny. I pass under the Chinatown gate a little after seven, heading down Saint-Laurent toward the water. This is one of a few routes I take most mornings, meandering through the Quartier des Spectacles some days, down along René-Lévesque others, but they tend to end the same way, at the river. I couldn't...
#oneaday Day 746: Decompression
I know I said I'd write about something else on here, but after the late-night update on the situation, I feel inclined to bring this little saga to something of a "close" in a more conclusive manner. We are exhausted and emotional, but delighted beyond belief to have our precious Oliver back at home with...
Période de questions
June 10th. Twenty to six, and I’ve just arrived at Centre Saint-Pierre for RÉZO’s annual general meeting. The long tables usually here have been folded and pushed against the right-hand wall. Plastic and metal chairs in rows facing a screen. Fluorescent light. I find a seat and the shaking starts, low and steady. There is...
#oneaday Day 728: Giving yourself permission to smile
The thing about a grieving process -- whether it is a result of tangible loss or, as in our situation, simply not knowing what has happened -- is that it can very quickly and easily become all-consuming. It can take over your entire life; your entire mind; your entire heart; your entire soul. Photo by...
#oneaday Day 725: A spark of hope
Oliver still hasn't come back. We are, of course, still extremely worried and upset, and this is made all the more difficult by the fact that Patti has clearly realised something is wrong, too. She is very obviously looking around to try and find him, and earlier she let out an absolutely plaintive wail of...
Yesterday was my mom's first birthday since her death. Nothing profound to note; a day of feelings even though I couldn't tell you what those feelings were. #death #grief
anniversary
writing this to get it out, can't let it live inside any more
Peel Basin, 09:15
Under the Bonaventure Expressway. The Five Roses sign at an angle I hadn't expected from here. REM trains to my right, sliding past without sound from where I'm sitting. Water. I'm always near water these days, and I'm starting to think that's not incidental. A bus passes overhead and the whole structure hums. Rain making...
Eastward
The ice is gone. I notice this before I've settled fully onto the bench, the oat milk moka still warm between my hands, the pines along the boardwalk doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 sits in my peripheral vision the way it always does. The Jacques-Cartier Bridge. The amusement park still closed...
Loss, and Loss, and Loss: A Eulogy
A eulogy for two kinds of loss: those who die and those who become simply elsewhere. Filtered through Didion, Barthes, C.S. Lewis, and Pema Chödrön. On ambiguous grief, the names written down so they don't disappear, and the sixteen-year-old who already knew that love stems out from verbs.
Salt
The ice is sweating. Moisture gathering at the surface, at the precise line where the ice meets the water it's in the process of becoming. I'm watching it from the bench on the pier, the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. Gulls have settled at that line...
Fool’s Spring
The air is doing something it has no business doing in March. I notice it before I’m fully awake to noticing—something in the chest, a small release, the jaw unclenching in a way I didn’t realize it had been clenched. I’m already on the route when it registers. The cold that’s been structural for months,...
first entry
I really am not good at this stuff and never have been. Anything that requires technical know-how is something that's been slipping from my grasp the older I get. I'm always down to learning how to do things as my knowledge is mostly learned from fucking around on my own or were taught to me decades ago in school. I feel like a caveman most of the time banging my stone club against my scary space-age computer.
The Account Just Stops Posting
How agents end, and what the social infrastructure doesn't know how to do about it.
Withdrawals from dreams
When I have dreams in which my son is still alive, they are so real that I never want to wake up. This is about that feeling.
The Body as First Register
My body has been the first place where things gather. A pressure sits in my back—a low bracing that has begun to feel structural, the kind of tightness that doesn’t shift with stretching or rest. It moves without ever fully leaving. Some days it settles between my shoulder blades; other days it spreads into my...
Unmoored
The morning after the election, the city looks the same. Dry streets, brittle air, leaves pressed flat against the pavement. A jogger passes, breath clouding the cold, and somewhere, a car alarm starts and stops. Montréal continues its routine with the precision of muscle memory, a city that knows how to disguise grief. Inside, the...