Obit Quotes

“To love anyone means to admit extinction. I tell myself this, so I never fall in love, so that the fire lights just me.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Blame has no face. I have walked on its staircase, around and around, trying to slap its face but only hitting my own cheeks.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“My Mother’s Lungs—began their dying sometime in the past. Doctors talked around tombstones. About the hedges near the tombstones, the font. The obituary writer said the obituary is the moment when someone becomes history. What if my mother never told me stories about the war or about her childhood? Does that mean none of it happened? No one sits next to my mother’s small rectangular tombstone, flush to the earth. The stone is meant to be read from above. What if I’m in space and can’t read it? Does that mean she didn’t die? She died at 7:07 a.m. PST. It is three hours earlier in Hawaii. Does that mean in Hawaii she hasn’t died yet? But the plane ride to Hawaii is five hours long. This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can’t. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“I now know that to be loved as child means to be watched. In high school, I loved when the teacher turned the lights off. A moment to feel loved and unseen at once. I understand now. We can't be loved when the lights are off.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Blame is just an echo of pain, a veil across the face of the one you blame. I blame God. I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown?”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Before my mother's death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Sometimes all I have are words and to write them means they are no longer prayers but are now animals. Other people can hunt them.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“I know the heart doesn’t really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way the word haystack never conjures up the same image twice. The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The artist is only visiting pain, imagining it. We praise the artist, not the apple, not the apple's shadow, which is murdered slowly. There must be some way of drawing a picture so that it doesn't become an elegy.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What's left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn’t the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“The way grief is really about future absence.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“When a mother dies,
a house becomes a forest.
My children, children,
know that I am in the trees.
True love means you won’t find me.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“In my child’s homework: Which of the following happens eventually? a) You are born, b) You die, c) A long winter comes to an end, d) Practice makes perfect. I no longer know how to answer this.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Tomas Tranströmer—died on March 26, 2015, at the age of 83. He wrote: I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case. // The only thing I want to say / glitters out of reach / like the silver / in a pawnbroker’s.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“A pioneering figure in the past, the future was the president of the present. You are sitting. But the future wants your chair. She is demanding.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“But maybe I am wrong, how death is simply death, each slightly different from the next but the final strike all the same. How the skin responds to a wedding dress in the same way it responds to rain.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“Because dying lasts forever until it stops.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit

“I put a fish ball in my mouth. My optimism covered the whole ball as if the fish had never died, had never been gutted and rolled into a humiliating shape. To acknowledge death is to acknowledge that we must take another shape.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit