currently reading: elizabeth mccracken; thanks ckm!

"...after most deaths, i imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything's changed; you no longer recognize the form of your days. there's a hole. it's person shaped and it follows you everywhere, to bed, to the dinner table, in the car...for us what was killing us was how nothing had changed. we'd been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life....."

"i was a character from an opera who might at any moment let loose with an aria, and generally people tried to cover it up with conversational ragtime. people changed the subject. they smiled uncomfortably. some tried extraordinary juggling acts, with flung torches of chitchat and spinning scimitars of small talk. they didn't mention it. they did not say, i am sorry or how are you? i felt in those first weeks, meeting people i knew, like the most terrifying object on earth.... i could feel how uncomfortable my mere presence made people feel, and i couldn't bear it. so i sat and listened...but all i could think was; dead baby, dead baby, dead baby..."

"i've never gotten over my discomfort at other people's discomfort. when people say, what have you been up to, i hestitate. i will tell myself, now if this were a husband or father or sister who died, you wouldn't simply omit the fact. if i say anything, people mostly change the subject anyway and i can't say that i blame them....the sadder the news, the less likely people are to mention it. the moment i lost my innocence about such things, i saw how careless i'd been myself..."

..."but my grief was still fresh, grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving..."

an exact replica of a figment of my imagination, elizabeth mccracken