What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

And all it did was remind her how hard it was for people to accept reality, my friend said to me. Our overpowering need either to stick our heads in the sand or to sentimentalize everything, she said.

Group therapy made her feel the opposite of supported, my friend said. It made her feel alien.

And later, when I heard that this woman had died, I felt all that anger surging up again, she said. It seemed so terribly wrong, the way her feelings had been denied, how none of us had come up with a single thing to say that might have been of any real help or comfort to her.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

Memory. We need another word to describe the way we see past events that are still alive in us, thought Graham Greene.

The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.

It is from death that the storyteller derives his authority, wrote Walter Benjamin, in his authoritative way.

Blessed are they that mourn.