Bodies in Motion and at Rest Quotes

“Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments...”
― Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

“How much of what we do, from the ridiculous to the sublime, would not be done if we did not die? In tha blank face of mortality we always ask , "What's next?”
― Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

“The sad truths I've been taught by the families of the dead are these: seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away. For those whose sons and daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers and friends went off alive and never did return, the worst that can happen has already happened. The light and air of what is known, however difficult, is better than the dark. The facts of death, like the facts of life, are required learning.”
― Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality

“It was there, in the parlors of the funeral home---my daily stations with the local lately dead---that the darkness would often give way to light. A fellow citizen outstretched in his casket, surrounded by floral tributes, waiting for the homages and obsequies, would speak to me in the silent code of the dead: "So, you think you're having a bad day?" The gloom would lift inexplicably. Here was one to whom the worst had happened, often in a variety of ways, and yet no word of complaint was heard from out the corpse. Nor did the world end, nor the sky fall, nor his or her people become blighted entirely. Life, it turns out, goes on with or without us. There is at least as much to be thankful for as wary of.”
― Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality