#grief

#grief

The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn't checked in. We'll find her. She wouldn't miss your wedding, Griffiths's sister, Melissa, assured her.

"I remember sitting in the ultrasound room," Mornhineway, 30, tells TODAY.com. "Our hearts dropped. They said there was nothing to be done. Most people terminate."

Over the past decade, 27-year-old Jenny Hollingworth's musical output has become steadily less strange. As half of Let's Eat Grandma, the Norwich native started out making freaky synth-folk the arch syrupiness of which chimed with the then-nascent hyperpop scene: I, Gemini, the duo's 2016 debut, was outsiderish juvenilia of the most thrilling variety. For its follow-up, I'm All Ears, Hollingworth and her bandmate, Rosa Walton, sharpened their songwriting skills while holding tight to their eccentricities; the result was an album of sensational futurist pop.

The experience may arrive as a dream that feels less like imagination and more like a profound moment of connection. A familiar scent like perfume or cologne may start drifting through a place where no one should. You may experience a sudden sense of being lovingly accompanied when you feel most alone, or a spontaneous song on the radio that carries such precision and memory it briefly stops time.

Nearly every day since Elvin Sanchez's wife died a couple of months ago after a long battle with diabetes, he could be found at the home of the elderly couple in the apartment next door, grabbing a meal and talking about the love of his life. Even on the day he died - when Sanchez was fatally struck crossing Linden Blvd. in East New York less than an hour into the near year - his neighbors had dinner on the table later that day

You're Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes... is an open mic event, the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality, to grieve, bereave & honor what we've lost & love, in laughter & in tears... while all the while making room for the joy & gratitude at simply being ALIVE.

You: Some days I'm depressed. Some days I'm busy and distracted. Some days I'm living in the past. Some days I'm present in the moment. Any way you look at it, I still don't feel like I'm the one doing the choosing, but I push through because there's no other choice. Me: It may not feel like it, but you're choosing life. You're choosing to get out of bed every morning and live in the real world.

A few days before he took his last, mercifully peaceful, breath, my husband, Ian Reinecke, looked at me intently and asked, Is there anything going on in the world I need to know about? No, nothing, I said as calmly as I could to the man with whom I had intensely discussed events in the world and at home for nearly 50 years.

Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, begins her memoir, The Other Girl, written in the form of a letter, with a description of a photograph of an infant in an embroidered dress. The description ends with these startling words: "When I was little, I believe-I must have been told-that the baby was me. It isn't me, it's you." (Italics mine.) 1

A mother's death is life-altering. Whether close, indifferent, or estranged, the relationship between a mother and child is weighty, monumental, and closely tied to self-image. When our mother dies, it's a rite of passage that awakens our own mortality and reminds us that we are now the end of the line-that we have gone from rooted to the world by the physical existence of the person we call mother to the one responsible for shaping our own legacy and heritage.

About a year into his job as an interfaith chaplain at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla., J.S. Park began to have what he calls "really awful death anxiety." "I saw all the ways people could be injured, especially working at a trauma center," he says. When he was around his wife and kids, he'd think, "this could be the last time that I get to hear their laughter and see their faces like this," he says.

Shadowloss describes the grief we carry in our day-to-day lives that we often don't share with others. It reminds us that the physical death of a loved one is not the only kind of loss. We may experience grief when we lose a job, a relationship, or a way of life; when we experience a health challenge; or when we must give up on a dream.

I remember telling my coworker I had to leave, recognizing that he instantly knew what I had learned; I remember seeing a sunset so beautiful that words don't do it justice, as if grandma was telling me, "I'm better now," on my way back to the hotel, where I'd spend hours crying, wishing I could see her one more time, wishing I could squeeze cancer like a rotting orange, ridding this earth of its putrid juices.

Tests were run and I was told it might be a clot. I recognized it as the kind that had killed a friend of mine just the year before. She was my age and also a mom of two. Healthy. Strong. I remember hearing she'd gone to the hospital and thinking, She's tough. I'll see her later this week. She was gone less than 24 hours later.

As the year draws to a close, photographs offer us a way to look back at the moments that defined the year. This collection brings together images made by NPR photojournalists working in communities across the country, photographers who are documenting moments both consequential and quietly human throughout the year. These images don't just cover the year's biggest headlines, though, they linger on scenes, sometimes not widely known, that stayed with the people behind the cameras.

As the first Christmas after my son William's death approached, I couldn't bear the thought of putting up a Christmas tree. I couldn't imagine displaying all the nutcrackers we had collected together. I couldn't walk into our usual family gathering pretending to be OK. I was petrified of being watched, being whispered about, and being pitied by the other guests. I knew their concern would come from a place of love, but I just didn't want anyone else to witness my holiday grief.

Above all else, grief is intensely personal. Where hope is a thing with feathers, a flying, beautiful feeling we all recognize, grief is its opposite: a universal emotion that's nonetheless mostly private and impossible to convey in its depths. Grief creates a gulf between you and other people. I find that ironic, given its universality. We'll all lose someone or something foundational, but that certainty doesn't make it any more legible. Though it does resonate; it does produce echoes in others.

I've always been fascinated by India. It's my mum's favourite country and the house we share is full of treasures from her travels there, from peacock fans and silk scarves, to jewellery boxes carved from mango wood. I grew up hearing spellbinding tales of painted elephants and mirrored palaces, and India soon occupied a special place in my imagination. Having got to 42 without making it to the promised land,

I've been dating a great guy, "Max," for about a year. Not too long after we met (we weren't dating then), we started talking about family, siblings, etc. I mentioned I'd had a sister who died at a young age in a car accident. He said he'd lost a brother, "John," the same way. It bonded us in a way, and it wasn't long after that talk that we began dating.

When Marjorie Prime premiered a decade ago, its technology felt abstract and futuristic. Today, it feels incremental. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty; it is fluent, responsive, and embedded in daily life. What once played as a cautionary what if now lands as a question of habit: not whether we would use such technology, but why we already do.

Sacks was referring to specific points in the past, which we may cite as examples of nostalgia. But his comment reveals something deeper, which applies to obsessiveness, broadly, and perfectionism, specifically. Both often entail a preoccupation with a lost past, but one that substantially differs from anything resembling reality. While nostalgia romanticizes the past, it, at least, captures some part of it. With perfectionism, the longing is often for the possibilities of one's past, rather than for the past itself.

Poetry is traditionally taught - at least it was taught to me - as a kind of thing you have to endure in English class; there's no sense of it applying to your life. But poetry, good poetry, is the stuff of life. Poetry asks us to slow down and to think about what we're reading, but also to experience it.

Grief doesn't follow a script. Whether you've lost someone suddenly or are navigating the slow unraveling that follows a major life change, it can be hard to find space for your emotions, let alone make sense of them. That's where journaling comes in. This commonly therapist-recommended tool has been shown to ease stress, clarify emotions, and support long-term healing. And, no, it doesn't have to be done daily to make a difference.

In 2023, I lost my soul dog, Chubbs. He had been with me for 14 years through every apartment, every move, and even a cross-country relocation from Texas to New York. When he passed, it felt like someone had pulled the anchor from my life. I didn't just lose my dog; I lost my sense of safety and the steady presence that had guided every chapter of my adult life. The grief felt overwhelming.

Seeing that V was struggling both physically - being sick - and emotionally - being so close to the anniversary of Bon's death - Sandy gives her a charter off and sends her to recuperate at a hotel, knowing that V would never ask for the time off herself. It's a kind gesture that is spurred, in part, by Nathan, who notices that V is not getting better and alerts the captain.

I do have tremendous amounts of peace and acceptance around what happened because of how we were able to make it for her. Winslet's eldest son, Joe, was then 13. For him as a child, seeing that love poured into this moment was huge. And then he discovered through conversations with friends that that's so rarely the case. Six years later, in 2023, Joe decided to turn the experience into a screenplay.

Mom worked for almost two decades after her divorce, but could not financially make up for the years she spent as a housewife. The low-paying jobs she had while married - cleaner, waitress, and such - counteracted her higher income as an administrative assistant. She ended up grossing $575.00 a month from social security, despite the fact that she could have drawn against my father's social security allotment for more than double that amount.

Landman, at its best, is an occupational hazard drama about one of the most dangerous industries in America. We might pal around with an oil company's president all day by following the life of Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton), but Landman's most engaging stories cover what happens when you run a business that reports zero days without an accident every single day. It's not just reenacting drilling explosions and gas leaksit's exploring the grief that comes with losing your loved ones on the job.

After the day of meetings, dinner, socializing, and after-dinner drinks, I found myself in the hotel room. On the surface, the day had been a nice departure from the stress of the prior weeks. But it was quiet, I was alone, exhausted, and felt numb. I stepped into the shower and, without warning, the floodgates of emotion burst forth, and I cried harder than I had cried in the weeks and months prior.

Most of my weekday mornings follow the same script. I pull into the drop-off line outside of my twins' elementary school, double-check their backpacks and take a sip of my coffee from my bright pink Yeti cup before it cools. But on a rainy November morning, sitting in the slow-moving line of cars, I found myself deep in thought. Before the doors opened, my twins, 6, reached for my hand, so we could do our quick handshake

Birthdays are usually depicted as happy celebrations with loved ones gathered, a cake, gifts, laughter, and, if it's a child's birthday, games and balloons. Even when resources are low, as they are for many people these days, something-no matter how minimal-is often done. If you look on social media, you see all the photos of these eventsl, with everyone smiling and close.