This Book Will Bury Me

by Ashley Winstead

Don’t you wish it worked like that—that love was any sort of protection?

Racism, classism, pretty bias: they color how we treat the dead as much as the living, no matter how much we swear we’re in the justice business. Lightly used to say racism is so pervasive you can’t even escape it by dying.

It’s what we will never know about the ones we love that binds us to them. I’d finally accepted that mystery is at the heart of love. That it’s our deep yearning to know the ones we love in ways that are ultimately impossible—we will never get close enough, never have long enough—that keep us bound to them, forever chasing. We are all of us searchers, I think. To love is to reach your hand across a distance that you’ll never fully close.