The Shape of Grief: A Library of Loss

THE SHAPE OF GRIEF

a library of loss

a collection of works that explore life after loss and how we live with grief

(click on any remnant to explore)

The Lost Ones by Jennifer Percy

From the NYTimes: "Five years after the tsunami that killed tens of thousands in Japan, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter."

AIDS Memorial Quilt

From The National AIDS Memorial: "The Quilt was conceived in November of 1985 by long-time San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones. Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped organize the annual candlelight march honoring these men. While planning the 1985 march, he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS. He asked each of his fellow marchers to write on placards the names of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders taping these placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt.Inspired by this sight, Jones and friends made plans for a larger memorial. A little over a year later, a small group of strangers gathered in a San Francisco storefront to document the lives they feared history would neglect. Their goal was to create a memorial for those who had died of AIDS, and to thereby help people understand the devastating impact of the disease. This meeting of devoted friends and lovers served as the foundation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt."

Terrible, Thanks for Asking with Nora McInerny

From Terrible, Thanks for Asking: "You know how when someone asks "How are you?" you just say "Fine,” even if you’re totally dying inside, so everyone can go about their day? 'Terrible, Thanks For Asking' is the opposite of that. Nora McInerny asks real people to share their complicated and honest feelings about how they really are. It’s sometimes sad, sometimes funny, and often both."

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

From Penguin: "Kazuo Ishiguro’s profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the 'great gentleman,' Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s 'greatness,' and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life."

The Babadook, a film by Jennifer Kent

From IFC Films: "Six years after the violent death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) is at a loss. She struggles to discipline her ‘out of control’ 6 year-old, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), a son she finds impossible to love. Samuel’s dreams are plagued by a monster he believes is coming to kill them both. When a disturbing storybook called ‘The Babadook’ turns up at their house, Samuel is convinced that the Babadook is the creature he’s been dreaming about."

Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens

Hilton Als writes of the album: "In 'Carrie and Lowell,' Sufjan Stevens is a child again or, more specifically, the child character in the family of man drama that often but not always centers on the story of love given, or love forsaken, but isn't that the same thing to the poet? That the love Stevens sings about having left or given or been born to —
thank you, Carrie — is a perceptible wound not only on the singer's throat, but his sleeve: he wears love's incomprehensibility, and the deep incomprehensibility of being a son, like a backing vocal on 'Carrie and Lowell,' which is also filled with colors, hearts, trees, conclusions, and beginnings, all adding up to the kind of intimacy that caught my eye the morning I sat in the diner waiting for the sun to get stronger as I saw intimacy pass by while going about it's business, like something sung and felt by Sufjan Stevens on his new beautiful solitary and rich record filled with faith and disbelief and the resurrection of trust and dreams."

The Blessing by Gregory Orr

From Milkweed Editions:

"When acclaimed poet Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath—a period of shock, sadness, and isolation—it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered.

Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr’s experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried.

Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art."

The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham

From Clarion/Mariner Books: "One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life... Using an index—that most formal and orderly of structures—Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality."

there are so many things we can lose, so many forms grief can take.

if we're so lucky as to live on this planet for any significant amount of time,

at some point we'll experience loss and live with grief — my own life has been shaped by both, and I return to these themes in my writing again and again.

this space is meant to be a simple offering, for you and me both:

a gathering, a garden, a gallery for all of what grief might be

so that we can take in its many facets and, as if turning a prism over in our hands,

find a flash of illumination in its midst.