Last weekend, I read Gail Caldwell’s grief memoir about the death of her best friend, Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010). I’ve included a few passages I liked:

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence and linear expectations, where I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. (150)

Everything about death is a cliché until you’re in it. (153)

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. (182)