Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend —that everything that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.
Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 74
Like anything that goes in for too long, grief is (I don’t know why people don’t talk about this aspect of it more often) unbelievably boring. I don’t mean in its earliest days, when the sorrow is too acute and the overall rearrangement of life too recent to allow for anything like tedium. Eventually, though, as you grow accustomed to its constant companionship, the monotony sets in. I can’t recall exactly how long after my father’s death this happened to me, because mourning also played havoc with my sense of time, but I think several months must have passed when the grief that had sloshed around turbulently inside me ebbed into a stagnant pool. It made life extremely dull and it made me seem extremely dull and, above all, it became, itself, unbelievably wearying.
Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 61
People don't know what to say to others who are grieving. They fear upsetting them, they don't know how to behave. But as my family learned, people who are grieving are desperate for support, for connection. It's always better to reach out to someone and just say simply, "I'm sorry," to let them know you're thinking about them, to give them a hug, and feel assured that that alone is enough.David Kushner, Alligator Candy: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), ch. 42.
[W]hile our experience of death was unique, the experience of grieving, of living with grief, of living with death, was universal. I was isolated by my grief for many reasons—my age, the circumstances, the mystery—but I had come to see how everyone is isolated by grief; how grief sends you spiraling inside yourself and how only you can find a way out. And the way out, as my parents discovered, was by finding support and community in other people.David Kushner, Alligator Candy: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), ch. 33.
We cannot remove the pain of loss. Death—whether of patients or of loved ones—will always be difficult. We can create reforms, we can institute policy changes, and we can even write books. But our professional fear and aversion to dying is the most difficult—and most fundamentally human—obstacle in changing end-of-life care. Our grief is the price we pay for caring for the terminally ill, and our aversion is the weight that anchors our inertia and denia.Pauline W. Chen, Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), Epilogue
