Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness

by Catherine Cho

Romantic love did not feature in these stories; they were an afterthought or a deficiency. Love, instead, was a sacrifice. It meant loss, it meant sorrow. Sacrifice, the giving of oneself completely, that was what was required, that was what was expected.

to love means to mourn, to know loss. The sweetness of love is tempered by the knowledge that life will return with a bitterness to create balance to the story.

I was a blind man’s daughter in a deaf man’s house.

There is a Korean expression that love only flows down, like a river or tears; love flows from one generation to the next, never the other way.

his anxiety was his own. I saw a man who had seen so many worst-case scenarios, who felt powerless to help and was terrified of having to recognize those own signs in the ones he loved. He knew he was an anxious man, he knew that he was always worried; it wasn’t Cato he was trying to protect, it was himself.

To bare one’s heart is to know suffering, vulnerability. It is a destructive force. That’s what makes it beautiful, to know mortality and failure, but to step off the edge anyway.