Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

“Grief is praise,” writes Martín Prechtel in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust, “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.

“Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.”

“You taught me the courage of stars before you left, how light carries on endlessly, even after death.” Those lyrics are from a song titled “Saturn,” by Ryan O’Neal, who performs as Sleeping at Last. It is a song about a deathbed conversation, the imparting of wisdom from a dying person to a beloved survivor: that it is an extraordinary chance to have existed at all, a rare and marvelous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness. Even more rare and marvelous, in this riven, aching world, to have thrived. To have found love, joy, security, fulfillment.