Marlise

“He experienced one of those moments of simultaneous confusion and clarity that belong to the drunk and the desperate.”
― Robert Galbraith, The Ink Black Heart

“We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Speeding through grief always has a cost. To bury somebody's supposed-to-be is also to bury a story that's untold. When you bury someone's story like that, it gets lodged in the ribcage, it gets radioactive, it festers, it shouts to be heard. Grief is always a voice that needs to speak. If you suppress it, it still speaks— but not always in ways that are healthy. Not in the ways you need. It pushes through your skin like rogue splinters.
Burying a future loss without telling its story can make you sick. Timesick. You get split between timelines. The further along you go, the further away you get from that dream, and you look around and wonder how people can keep going while you want the world to stop, time to freeze, to get back to your real universe. And you get well-meaning people around you, always the ones who mean well, who are nudging you forward, shoving you, really, and you clutch two timelines until you're ripped in half.
Part of my role as a chaplain, I've learned, is to make room for these original timelines. That they may be spoken, shared. The story told. "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you, Zora Neale Hurston said. It must be conversely true that there is no greater peace than to tell that story.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve