There's not much good to say.

We started this newsletter with the intention of calling gray gray; to represent chaos as chaos and examine the unseen complexities of things that seem simple.?

The past month has brought global events that words fail to explain — but sometimes words are all we have for comfort.

Instead of our initially planned October issue of product marketing scary stories, we’ve curated a selection of excerpts, poems, and quotes. These pieces of writing reveal how people much smarter than us find the words and form to contain loss. We hope you find something helpful here.?

This is the grief issue.?

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You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone’s being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.?

Kevin Young?

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

from The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

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The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

from Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden

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Someone is dead.

Even the trees know it,

those poor old dancers who come on lewdly,

all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.

I think…

I think I could have stopped it,

if I'd been as firm as a nurse

or noticed the neck of the driver

as he cheated the crosstown lights;

or later in the evening,

if I'd held my napkin over my mouth.??

I think I could…

if I'd been different, or wise, or calm,

I think I could have charmed the table,

the stained dish or the hand of the dealer.??

But it's done.

It's all used up.

There's no doubt about the trees

spreading their thin feet into the dry grass.

A Canada goose rides up,

spread out like a gray suede shirt,

honking his nose into the March wind.??

In the entryway a cat breathes calmly

into her watery blue fur.

The supper dishes are over and the sun

unaccustomed to anything else

goes an the way down.

Lament by Anne Sexton

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"Why are you crying, mama?" he asked; the

minute his feet touched the floor he recognized his mother's face.

"Your father is dead," she said.

And then, as if her coiled grief had suddenly

burst free, she turned and turned in a tight

circle until hands grasped her shoulders and

stopped the spiraling of her tortured body.

Through the door he could see the dawn.

There were no stars. Only a leaden gray sky

still untouched by the rays of the sun. A drab

light that seemed more like the onset of

night than the beginning of day.

from Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

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Dawn...It was time for us to gather up Father's ashes. Each of us picked up a pair of hollow chopsticks and walked to Adashi moor. Even the last traces of smoke had disappeared this morning, and there was only the sound of the wind blowing uneasily in the pines. When I had come back on that night the third month, I had received the joyful cup of wine. Now, at dawn, I was gathering up the sad white bones of parting. The world is like a rope, plaited with strands of joy and anger, pain and pleasure. All that meets will part. This present state of affairs should not surprise me, but until now I had always relied on Father whenever I returned to my village. From now on, whose strength could I depend on? I have no wife or child to hold my affection. I haven't a thing to my name and am drifting like foam on the water, blowing along with the wind like a speck of dust. Yet this string of beads that is my life is difficult to snap.

Left behind

and drenched as the grass,

with drops of dew.

…

We cannot make water flow back again, we cannot return fire to the flint. No matter how many regrets we may have, they are all useless. Each of the relatives on whom we think we can rely will pass on to decay. Ah, this lonely orphan Issa, abandoned like someone banished to an unknown land! How piteous I felt.

from Journal of My Father's Last Days by Kobayashi Issa, trans. R. Huey

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The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found???

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,???

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.???

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world???

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence???

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind???

While there is still time.

The Mower by Philip Larkin?

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In mourning we found that the inhibition and loss of interest are fully accounted for by the work of mourning in which the ego is absorbed. In melancholia, the unknown loss will result in a similar internal work and will therefore be responsible for the melancholic inhibition. The difference is that the inhibition of the melancholic seems puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing him so entirely. The melancholic displays something else besides what is lacking in mourning — an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego at a grand scale.?

from Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmond Freud?

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Soft.

Slight.

Like light, like a child’s foot talcum-dusted and kissed,

like stroke-reversing suede, like dust, like pins and needles, like a

promise, like a curse, like seeds, like everything grained, plaited, linked,

or numbered, like everything nature-made and violent and quiet.

It is all completely missing. Nothing patient now.

from Grief is the thing with Feathers by Max Porter

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I had seen nothing beyond life and accepted it as ultimate truth. When of a sudden death came, and in a moment tore a gaping rent in its [life’s] smooth-seeming fabric, I was utterly bewildered. All around, the trees, the soil, the water, the sun, the moon, the stars, remained as immovably true as before; and yet the person who was as truly there, who, through a thousand points of contact with life, mind and heart, was ever so much more true for me, had vanished in a moment like a dream. What perplexing self-contradiction it all seemed to me as I looked around! How was I ever to reconcile what remained with which had gone?

from My Remniscents by Rabindranath Tagore

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'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,

To give these mourning duties to your father:

But, you must know, your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;

It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,

A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,

An understanding simple and unschool'd:

For what we know must be and is as common

As any the most vulgar thing to sense,

Why should we in our peevish opposition

Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd: whose common theme

Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,

From the first corse till he that died to-day,

'This must be so.' We pray you, throw to earth

This unprevailing woe, and think of us

As of a father: for let the world take note,

You are the most immediate to our throne;

And with no less nobility of love

Than that which dearest father bears his son,

Do I impart toward you. For your intent

In going back to school in Wittenberg,

It is most retrograde to our desire:

And we beseech you, bend you to remain

Here, in the cheer and comfort of our eye,

Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

from Hamlet by William Shakespeare

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There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

from Beloved by Toni Morrison?

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Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Today, like every other day by Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks

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Woke up early this morning and from my bed

looked far across the Strait to see

a small boat moving through the choppy water,

a single running light on. Remembered

my friend who used to shout

his dead wife’s name from the hilltops

around Perugia. Who set a plate

for her at his simple table long after

she was gone. And opened the windows

so she could have fresh air. Such display?

I found embarrassing. So did his other

friends. I couldn’t see it.?

Not until this morning.?

Grief by Raymond Carver

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Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance

The stages have evolved since their introduction and they have been very misunderstood over the

past three decades. They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They

are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss as there is no

typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.?

from Five Stages of Grief by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

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Remember too, when despair menaces you that giving in to it

will only disturb the one who has died. Your sorrow may even

drag her back from the path she may be taking toward a good

rebirth. And if you are consumed by grief you will cripple yourself

from being able to help her. The steadier you are, the more positive

your state of mind, the more comfort you will give her, and the

more you will enable her to free herself.

When you are sad, have the courage to say to yourself: "Whatever feelings?

I am experiencing, they will all pass: even if they

return, they cannot last" Just as long as you do not try to prolong

them, all your feelings of loss and grief will naturally begin to dissolve and fall away.?

from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not

afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same

fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the

yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or

concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and

me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to

want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be

about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they

would talk to one another and not to me.

from A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

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CHORUS First-comer of the returners, welcome here.?

HERALD I am well come indeed; complete and beyond death's fear.?

CHORUS You feared to be robbed of return to your fatherland??

HERALD That was the fear filled these eyes where joy's tears now stand.?

CHORUS Then we may rejoice that the army too knew this disease.?

HERALD The army too? Were you not at peace here? At ease??

CHORUS Our time was like yours. It was fear and longing and loss.?

HERALD From the overseas army, our grief for you echoed across??

CHORUS Time of echoes and rebounds of bitterness, truly, it was.?

HERALD And this fit of heartsickness fell on my homeland because... ??

CHORUS My oldest recourse against trouble's to hold my tongue.?

HERALD Some trouble, some fear, the lords being away so long??

CHORUS Your words to describe it, “beyond death's fear”, are not wrong.?

HERALD Beyond fear—for all is done well!?

Or mostly so:?

in a long war it's sure collateral damage will come.?

Whose lives escape all blame, all trouble? Only the gods'.?

Oh, I could speak of hardships and ill-lodgings!?

No bed but the verminous straw on the trampling deck,?

day after day on the bile-green-sliding sea:?

when you can't see the land, what doesn't make you sick??

Yet when we made landfall things got even worse,?

bivouacked within bowshot of Troy’s walls?

in a mildew marsh that bubbled mephitic mists,?

our hair and our clothes alive with crawling horrors.?

Or we could talk of the bird-killing cold of the winters,?

the unbearable cold that blew from the high snows of Ida.?

Or again of the heat, the doldrum heat of the sea,?

the waveless and windless siesta of blank noon.?

from Agamemnon by Aeschylus?

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Cremated. Something clicked inside Jess's head. That meant Leslie was gone. Turned to

ashes. He would never see her again. Not even dead. Never. How could they dare? Leslie

belonged to him. More to him than anyone in the world. No one had even asked him. No one

had even told him. And now he was never going to see her again, and all they could do was

cry. Not for Leslie. They weren't crying for Leslie. They were crying for themselves. Just

themselves. If they'd cared at all for Leslie, they would have never brought her to this rotten

place. He had to hold tightly to his hands for fear he might sock Bill in the face.

He, Jess, was the only one who really cared for Leslie. But Leslie had failed him. She

went and died just when he needed her the most. She went and left him. She went swinging

on that rope just to show him that she was no coward. So there, Jess Aarons. She was

probably somewhere fight now laughing at him. Making fun of him like he was Mrs. Myers.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world,

and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded

there like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.?

from Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

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I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.

What do I remember?

I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out, that twenty-three people must be in a room before there is a fifty-fifty chance two will have the same birthday. Who cares whether or not it's true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.

I review those things that will figure in the retelling: a kiss through surgical gauze, the pale hand correcting the position of the wig. I noted these gestures as they happened, not in any retrospect—though I don't know why looking back should show us more than looking at.

It is just possible I will say I stayed the night.

And who is there that can say that I did not?

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.

Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

from In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried by Amy Hempel