After mom died, I found great comfort in a medieval Andalusian tale | Psyche Ideas

Something fundamental in our culture has ended. What exactly, I can’t quite put my finger on. As many things in the liminal, it’s hard to grasp. But if we want to birth something new out of it, we have to come to terms with endings. We have to come to terms with the ultimate ending, the very thing Covid-19 forces us to look at: our inevitable death... See more

That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees... See more

After the death of a loved one, the incoming messages seem scrambled for a while. At times, closeness with our deceased loved one feels incredibly visceral, as though they are present in the room, here and now. At other times, the string seems to have fallen off the board — not shorter or longer than it was before, but simply stolen from us entirel... See more

Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.