Quote of the Day

Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing.  Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming.  All we can do is learn to swim.

-- Vicki Harrison

Quote of the Day

The work of a mature human being is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by these two things.

-- Francis Weller

Quote of the Day

In order to get over [the pain], I had to eat it and digest it.  I had to be in that zone.  I poured all my heart, all my emotions, all my mental torture into the music.  And maybe I'm moving on.  I selfishly compose for myself, but I don't think it's selfish because we are just human beings.  We do have a lot of differences, but we are much more similar than different.  I really truly believe that my very personal story can reach out to and appeal to a lot of people.

-- Jihye Lee

Quote of the Day

I think sorrow is natural.  And I had a friend once in the age when a psychiatrist thought it was a good idea to give you a lot of drugs if you were going through grieving and sorrow, and then you just wouldn't feel it.  What that means is you never get over it, because you haven't had that experience, which is a very human one, and everyone has it sooner or later.  It's grief.  And since I'm now in the land of windows, I'm the person that they phone and they say, "Will this ever be over?  How do I get through this?"  So one day at a time, but don't expect there to be no sorrow.

-- Margaret Atwood

Quote of the Day

There is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

-- Edward Elgar

Quote of the Day

Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness.  It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love.  The only cure for grief is to grieve.

-- Earl Grollman

Quote of the Day

Grief is not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of love.  It's the price we pay for having deeply connected to someone or something.

-- Dr. Thema Bryant

Quote of the Day

My songs are like my journals.  And when other people relate to the music, I'm like, "Oh, thank God I'm not alone."

-- Laufey

Quote of the Day

I see your life as already artful, waiting,

just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

-- Toni Morrison

Quote of the Day

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.  I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.  Let them become the photograph on the table.  Let them become the name on the trust accounts.  Let go of them in the water.  Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.  In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 225-226

Quote of the Day

Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate.  Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost.  Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response.  They searched.  They stopped eating.  They forgot to breathe.  They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists' offices with obscure ear infections.  They lost concentration.  "After a year I could read headlines," I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before.  They lost cognitive ability on all scales.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 46-47

Quote of the Day

When I checked the piece for publication I was startled and unsettled by how many mistakes I had made: simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong.  I told myself that this was temporary, part of the mobilization problem, further evidence of those cognitive deficits that came with either stress or grief, but I remained unsettled.  Would I ever be right again?  Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 200

Quote of the Day

A doctor to whom I mentioned (that I had inadvertently given the hospital an old address) shrugged, as if I had told him a familiar story.  Either he said that such"cognitive deficits" could be associated with stress or he said that such cognitive deficits could be associated with grief.  It was a mark of those cognitive deficits that within seconds after he said it I had no idea which he had said.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 200

Quote of the Day

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him.  This impulse did not end with his death.  What ended was the possibility of response.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 194

Quote of the Day

... consider those dolphins who refuse to eat after the death of a mate.  Consider those geese who search for the lost mate until they themselves become disoriented and die.  In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 193

Quote of the Day

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

-- Philippe Aries

Quote of the Day

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity.  We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it.  We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it."  We understand the aversion most of us have to "dwelling on it."  Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 192

Quote of the Day

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing."  A certain forward movement will prevail.  The worst days will be the earliest days ... We have no way of knowing ... ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188-189

Quote of the Day

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188

Quote of the Day

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn.  Grief was passive.  Grief happened.  Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 143

Quote of the Day

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces.  I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others.  The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.  It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 74-75

Quote of the Day

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.  Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves."

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 27

Quote of the Day

Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 116

Quote of the Day

My grief for you will always remain unruly, even as I know it contains the logic of everyone who has ever felt it.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 191

Quote of the Day

But for now, I must poke holes in all this curiosity so that I might breathe, so that I might get on with the second half of my life.  If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must learn to be on the side of the living.  I must learn to accept that we are not the same. 

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 191

Quote of the Day

Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes I was just alone.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 168

Quote of the Day

The anxiety may have been a blanket but the sadness was a knife.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 168

Quote of the Day

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

-- Joan Didion, The White Album

Quote of the Day

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.  The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

-- Thomas Merton

Quote of the Day

Time only pushes wounds aside.  Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss.  Usually, this is a good thing.  So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident.  But every so often, there is no such thing as regular life.  Every so often, life crowds out loss with more loss.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 154

Quote of the Day

Those living with grief know the particular sleeplessness it engenders -- so nonnegotiable, so immune to warm milk and narcotics.  Typical insomnia has an apologetic feel, like it doesn't want to be here any more than you do.  Like it knows you have a big day tomorrow but can't help itself.  Grief insomnia has a mouth on it: Time does not heal all wounds.  Time does not heal any wounds.  Who promised you that?  Get your money back.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 154

Quote of the Day

Anger is a cousin of intelligence.  If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries.  If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge.  If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 133

Quote of the Day

... real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 122

Quote of the Day

It's unpredictable, this stage of grief.  Just when you think you have a handle on it, a crack opens up where the crazy gets in.  The pain is a weather system that builds and expands, occasionally touching down, like lightning.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 93

Quote of the Day

The person who has not at some point accepted with ultimate resolve and even rejoiced in the absolute horror of life will never take possession of the unspeakable powers vested in our existence.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Quote of the Day

No one is obliged to learn something from loss.  This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they're still in the fetal position.  Like feeding steak to a baby.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 5-6

Quote of the Day

Either you jump out the window or you live.

-- Brooke Hayward, Haywire

Meeting Jeff Smith

This evening, I met author/activist/archivist Jeff Smith, who spoke at Out on the Lakeshore about his latest book, A People's History of Grand Rapids.

Quote of the Day

It was always the music that explained things.  What it is that takes you out of being just a kid and thinking it's all adventure, and you find there's a lesson underneath all that adventure.  You come into life alone and you go out of it alone, and you're gonna be alone a lot of the times when you're on this earth, and what tells it all?  It's the music.

-- Sidney Bechet

Quote of the Day

The depth of your pain will always be equal to the depth of your love.

-- Shannon L. Alder

Quote of the Day

I can't think of Billie Holiday without tears coming to my eye.  There was always something of pain, always something that was heartbreaking in her rendition.  And she wasn't only talking about her own heartbreak.  She was talking about yours, too.  The thing that joined us, you know, was the common concept that the misery she was singing, you know, was one that included us and embraced us all.

-- Ossie Davis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

And for some reason I rather thought that black people actually captured that very well in music was this kind of loneliness in the human condition that no matter how much you yearn for community and yearn for community, in the end there is this loneliness and there's no way you can escape it.  And that's to me, what the best jazz when you hear a soloist often, especially in a slow piece or a ballad piece, that's sort of what the best jazz, to me has always felt like.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

When you hear Billie Holiday sing, you hear the spirit of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong together in a person.  So you have the fire of the blues shouter.  You have the intelligent choice of notes like a great jazz musician like Louis Armstrong.  But you have, with her, a very profound sensitivity to the human condition.  She tells you something about the pain of the blues, of life, but inside of that pain is a toughness and that's what you're attracted to.

-- Wynton Marsalis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The big band music was popular because first it comes out of the soil of the country.  It has the happiness and joy of the sound of jazz in it.  It was at a certain time in the country where you have a certain sophistication and a belief in adult sensibility.

-- Wynton Marsalis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

It's orchestrated Louis [Armstrong], that's what the swing era is.

-- Gary Giddins, Jazz

Quote of the Day

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

-- Duke Ellington

Quote of the Day

And overnight, (Benny Goodman) walks into the American parlor with jazz by the scruff of its neck.  And all of a sudden, jazz, which was almost a cult music, has become American popular music.  And that's what Goodman did.

--James Maher, Jazz

Quote of the Day

Song is the wind chime of memory...

--James Maher, Jazz

Quote of the Day

People needed dance music maybe more than ever in America [in the 1930s] because the country was in such doldrums.  So, I think people needed the escape of going to the Savoy and to those other places to dance.  They needed those bands.  As an antidote to the Depression, I think swing music did as much as MGM musicals to help America through.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

In the mid-1930s, as the Great Depression stubbornly refused to lift, jazz came as close as it has ever come to being America's popular music.  It had a new name now, swing, and its impact was revolutionary.  Swing rescued the recording industry.  In 1932, just 10 million records had been sold in the United States.  By 1939, that number would grow to 50 million.

-- Jazz

Quote of the Day

(Creating jazz) was a way for people to break with the old.  It was a way to break from Europe, it was a way to break from Old Victorian mores, it was to break from a whole bunch of other stuff.  It was sort of clean in that respect, and America no longer had to look back to its past, no longer had to look back to Europe or anything else.  The blacks when they invented this music weren't looking back to Africa, they were looking at America and looking at the future, and looking at what they were as Americans.  Europeans who came to this country and became Americans were attracted to this music, found in this music a way to break from Europe.  Finally, the Emersonian doctrine of "Create your art here" from The American Scholar finally came into fruition with this music.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The blues are about freedom....there's a liberation and reality and...when they talk about being sad...the fact that you recognize that which, which pains you is a very freeing and liberating experience.  It's just, it must be strange for other cultures where you spend most of your time trying to pretend like you don't have any of these problems or any of these, you know, situations.

-- Branford Marsalis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The blues could be about anything: a beautiful woman, a mean boss, the devil himself.  But they were always intensely personal, meant to make the listener feel better, not worse.

-- Jazz

Quote of the Day

(Blues) lyrics may have been tragic in their orientation, but the music was about having a good time.  So, the music was really a matter of stomping the blues away.

-- Albert Murray, Jazz

Quote of the Day

There was a big difference between having the blues and playing the blues 'coz playing the blues was a matter of getting rid of the blues.

-- Albert Murray, Jazz

Quote of the Day

Black people since the end of the Civil War were searching for an aesthetic.  They're searching for an aesthetic that will free them of minstrelsy, freedom of the burden of minstrelsy, freedom of the degradation of minstrelsy.  What emerges from that is a form called the "Blues" and it's a very useful form.  It's elastic.  You can do a lot with it because it's simple.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The blues is about sculpting meaning out of a situation that seems to defy you're being able to find meaning in it.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

(Jazz) is America's music.  Born out of a million American negotiations; between having and not having; between happy and sad; country and city; between black and white; and men and women; between the old Africa and the old Europe, that could only have happened in an entirely new world.  It is an improvisational art, making itself up as it goes along, just like the country that gave it birth.

-- Jazz

Quote of the Day

Some people are damaged.  And damaged people damage people.

-- Steve Maraboli

Quote of the Day

The reality is that you will grieve forever.  You will not "get over" the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.  You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.  You will be whole again but you will never be the same.  Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

-- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

Quote of the Day

... I have learned that emotions are energy in motion.  And it's important that I feel the full range of my humanity.  And anger that is processed becomes strength and motivation.

-- Ashley Judd

Quote of the Day

Often when people talk with me about having brain fog when they're bereaved, it's like they think they're damaged.  You're not damaged.  Your brain is simply busy trying to help you.  But you need to help it as well by giving it awareness and self-compassion.

-- Mary-Frances O'Connor

Quote of the Day

Just listening to music activates more brain regions simultaneously than any other human activity.

-- Alexander Pantelyat, M.D. Director, Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine

Hearing Tsering Yangzom Lama and Shane McCrae

Two nights ago, I attended the latest edition of  Hope College's Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series, featuring novelist Tsering Yangzom Lama and poet/memoirist Shane McCrae.

Hearing Dana VanderLugt

Last night, I attended an event featuring author/educator Dana VanderLugt and poet/retired professor Jack Ridl at Hope College.  The two engaged in an on-stage conversation about VanderLugt's new book, Enemies in the Orchard.

Quote of the Day

... language is a form of power.  It creates categories that help us interpret the world, and that which is not easily available in language is often ignored in thought itself.  A shared vocabulary makes ideas more accessible while a lack of language can render an experience illegible.  It can isolate.

-- Angela Chen, Ace, p. 17

Quote of the Day

I think all creative people, you get something in your head, and then you have to figure out how to express it.  And I feel like that's the best way to understand what it's like to be an artist.

-- Sofia Coppola

Quote of the Day

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.  For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

-- Mary Oliver

Quote of the Day

ANDERSON COOPER: The strange thing about grief is that it feels so alone.  And yet it is this experience which everybody has gone through or will go through, and yet it still feels so lonely.

ASHLEY JUDD: No one can do it for us.  We do not have to do it alone.

All There Is with Anderson Cooper, "Ashley Judd: Grief, Love and Naomi"