The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

The family she came from defined her and always would.

Most Lives Will Be Lost to Time.

But Jane had become an expert

at shaping the small traumas of her past into amusing anecdotes.

“It means once you meet your kids, it’s hard to imagine their existence as some random act of biology,” Allison said. “As individuals, they seem destined for you. Don’t you think?”

Did the living matter as much to the dead as the dead did to the living?

Sometimes the tragedies of a person’s life didn’t happen neatly, single file, one at a time, but all at once, so that it was impossible to know how you felt about any part of the whole.

History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

The definition of a lifetime, as she saw it, was when the people most important to you wouldn’t recognize the ones who previously filled their roles. Make new friends but keep the old, went a song from her childhood.

Perhaps love required some element of difficulty. Perhaps in order to be true, love must also be inconvenient.

Certainly the fastest way to forget one’s own troubles is by helping someone else face hers,

One could spend a lifetime trying to make sense of the bare facts of what transpired before our eyes that day on the beach. But what was inside me could never be told, to her or anyone.

I never had an image in mind for how life ought to look. I believe that to be the most freeing fact of my existence. —

Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.

NOT LOST BUT GONE BEFORE.

In every graveyard in every town in all the

world, there lie buried stories more remarkable and strange than a name, a date, a designation on stone could ever in a million years convey.

There were versions of death that existed inside of life, Jane thought. Her drunken blackouts, that time unaccounted for. The state Betty and the other patients here were in, almost the opposite of being ghosts—a body with no awareness, no memory. The shadows of past lives all around in graveyards, in old houses, in Jane’s work as an archivist. In stories.

Allison told Jane once that a person’s oldest memories were the last ones the brain held on to, and that

often, her mother w...

Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.

The silver lining of being a total fuck-up was that you could sometimes find the grace to give others a pass for their failings. Or if not a pass, at least some understanding.

Most lives will be lost to time.

Emily Dickinson tattooed on her wrist: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

It was like the opposite of an old boys’ club. Women connected by their lack of connections, helping one another rise.

the effects of mass trauma—genocide, slavery, colonialism—got passed down from one generation to the next at the cellular level. Native Americans referred to this as the soul wound. Some believed it played a role in high rates of addiction, mental illness, suicide, and sexual violence in their community today.

was it so much further a leap to imagine that trauma might infect the land on which it happened? Was that a form of haunting all its own?