Finding Grace

by Loretta Rothschild

But it was like I was trapped inside a snow globe that nobody was shaking.

When Tom arrived home, the whole house was silent, yet everything spoke.

Grief’s iron grip never weakens. You just become accustomed to its hand around your throat, moving forward but never moving on.

“A swan can only take off on a lake. If a swan can’t take off, then it’s a pond.” I didn’t care if it was true, it was the most romantic theory I’d ever heard.

You can’t boycott grief, unless you want to boycott happiness with it.

But grief isn’t an oyster—you can’t swallow it whole.

The kitchen was spotless, but the tension hung there like a leg of dry-cured ham.

When I died, Tom became a widower, a word that needs no further explanation. But there is no word in the English dictionary for a parent who loses a child. They remain the same: a father, a mother, suspended in time. Forever explaining, forever retelling, forever tethered to an indigestible loss.

There is no knack to grief. It’s like the sky—it hangs over everything.

Potty-training your child means you spend an inordinate amount of time sitting on the floor of the bathroom inhaling the fricassee of toddler farts.