I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
Interpretation
Loss transforms us, shaping our character and making us more compassionate.
This quote speaks to the enduring impact of loss on individuals. It suggests that rather than completely recovering from significant losses, we integrate them into our lives, allowing these experiences to shape us into more empathetic and gentle versions of ourselves. The idea is that through the process of grieving and absorbing our losses, we evolve into beings marked by a deeper understanding and kindness.
In practice
Sharing the quote during a support group for those grieving.
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.
I've never had a particular skill. I can't cook, dance, play an instrument, speak a foreign language. This used to worry me. I'd think, when I'm grown up, at 18, then I made it 21, it will be clear what role I should have in life. It never happened. I never signed on the dotted line as the sort of adult my father wanted.
i will live by the gun and die by the gun
One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream you have within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living.
This is the strangest life I've ever known.
(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.
I've been around longer than most of my fans have been alive.
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