Under the Whispering Door

by T.J. Klune

I can’t grieve for myself.” Hugo shook his head slowly. “Of course you can. We do it all the time, regardless of if we’re alive or not, over the small things and the big things. Everyone is a little bit sad all the time.

That last line hits me hard. A variation of it was used in NBC’s The Good Place—as an aside: before Whispering Door became the book you’re reading, the idea was seeing Wallace enter the afterlife and deal with the insipid bureaucracy. However, as sometimes happens, someone else got there first and did it better than I ever could: namely, The Good Place. I went in a different direction, but some of the things I wanted to hit on remained, especially the idea of what grief is, and how it affects us. No two people grieve the same way, and yet, grief is universal. You live long enough to learn what love is, you know loss. And grief comes in many shapes and sizes: there are little deaths—the loss of opportunities or something going wrong at every turn—and there are big deaths—those that consume us until we feel like we’ve been hollowed out, leaving only pain. We can overcome, much of the time, but the fact still remains: we’re all a little bit sad all the time. That’s not a failure; that’s part of being human.