The Maidens

by Alex Michaelides

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. —C. S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed

Freud’s writings about grief and loss. And he argued that, following the death of a loved one, the loss had to be psychologically accepted and that person relinquished, or else you ran the risk of succumbing to pathological mourning, which he called melancholia—and we call depression.

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all …

My argument with so much of psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people’s suffering. —ARTHUR MILLER

The childhood shows the man, As morning shows the day.