The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

by Stephen Grosz

Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But isn’t this attentiveness – the feeling that someone is trying to think about us – something we want more than praise?

At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.

It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.

My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow.

Closure is just as delusive – it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.