Grief support

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I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

Richard Feynman

Excerpt from Feynman's letter to Arline Greenbaum, his first wife, written in October 1946, 488 days after her passing.

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours. Lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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The grieving person has to eat, breathe, regain less fitful sleep, and the world and its people, which had been circling around the great stillness at an awkward distance, start to encroach again. But that is not consolation. The wound heals but it does not disappear. A stillness and an absence remain, which sometimes hurts unexpectedly.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain. You would like to play the piano, but the rain comes to sit alongside and play an accompaniment. And then the dry weather returns, which is to say there is steam and bright light. People age quickly.

Sándor Márai, Embers

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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We dissolve the foreign body of pain of which we know neither its actual consistency and makeup nor how many (perhaps) life-affirming stimuli it imparts, once it has been dissolved, to our blood!

Stay with your pain, and instead of shrinking away from it, use it to forge another path back into life.

[...] somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval (excerpts taken from three different letters)

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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This is what we welcome now above all, that human beings are making a new start here and there to rebuild life with the strength and the faith of their indestructible hearts. There are others who could try this but who still just stand there, staring and trying to make sense of it all, and for whom sadness and sloth finally become utterly insurmountable. And this even though, based on feeling and reflection, only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself somewhere to nature with unconditional purpose, to what is strong, striving, and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if it can happen only in the least important, daily matters.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

Meghan O’Rourke

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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I always think that such a great weight, with its tremendous pressure, somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so that we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile. I gained this experience very early on through various circumstances, and it was then confirmed from pain to pain: What is here and now is, after all, what has been given and is expected of us, and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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I think we have to experience boundlessness through our incapacity to measure even the measurable. That is why Kierkegaard includes us in the seriousness of death, without attributing to us a time limit or an eternal future beyond it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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For we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have left us—and they and we are at once united in one being in which separation is just as unthinkable. Would we otherwise be able to understand such poems, if they were only the statements of a future dead person? Don’t they address—inside of us—besides the present conditions also continually something unlimited and unrecognizable? Yes, I think that the spirit cannot make itself so small that it concerns nothing but our existence in the here and now: Where it rushes toward us, we are both the living and the dead.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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Don’t believe that something that belongs to our pure realities could drop away and simply cease.

Just think how much in our daily lives misleads and troubles us, and renders another person’s love imprecise for us. But now he is definitely here, now he is completely free to be here and we are completely free to feel him...

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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My attitude toward death is that it frightens me more in those whom I failed to truly encounter and who remained inexplicable or disastrous to me, than it does in those whom I loved with certainty when they were alive, even if they burst only for a brief moment into the radiant transfiguration of intimacy which love can reach.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.

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[t]he fact that Christmas would have passed without even the smallest sign of my thoughts for you on its way, I would hardly have thought possible. And I have now also failed in this instance, for time passed with all of its external pressures and the many demands that I did not meet. But I may assure you that during the few moments of more solemn and somewhat festive contemplation that the presence of a Christmas tree always prompts in me, my recollections did not just fleetingly touch upon you but I have truly thought of you, have gathered my thoughts near you, and my thinking has—let me be precise—been able to come to rest near you. And there was a moment when I was filled with the determination that we would soon be granted an actual meeting in person where we could really speak to one another, which would allow me to make up for the sin of my silence.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval

* Video disclaimer: AI has been used for the voiceover only, which had to be heavily edited by a human being to make usable too.