A review by dawndeydusk
Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

4.75

At this point, I’ve read quite a few books on grief, and none has hit me as hard as Crying in H-Mart until this one.

…“But what they do not understand is that if I do not capture what I have lost, it will be like losing it twice.”

“The miracle of life is not that we have it, it’s that most of us wake up every day and agree to fight for it, to hold it in our arms even when it squirms to get away. It’s a miracle, a genuine miracle, that the reverse doesn’t happen more often. Or, to quote Russell’s favorite film, The Lion in Winter: ‘Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives.’”

“The time it took Woolf to fill her pockets with rocks. The selection of those rocks. When does a suicide begin? When do we start counting? At the riverbank or in the river? In the kitchen the night before or the next morning?”

“Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.”

It feels a silly, rather trite task to dissect a “good” grief book. It isn’t really about being “good” at all. Not about years or experience, or maybe even direct closeness to tragedy. Some of the best poetry written sits in a 2nd grade teacher’s recycling bin (an accidentally twice-printed copy of a student’s assignment).

But this, to me, is good. It’s solidified in amber, for me. In the face of loss and grief, there’s no need or reason to be elegant or to be pretty with it. There shouldn’t be a need to coax somebody to listen. To set up a narrative or to invite them on the journey. Why should anybody who has ever lost both a mirror and frame of themselves be busy thinking about a hook?

I have not stood on a cliff in Australia, but I’ve stood on Rila, and I’ve sat by the banks in Nessebar, feeling both slighted yet comforted by a man crawling on the concrete in a wetsuit. Little does he know the waters hold part of my life.