I finished reading again Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry tonight. I’ve probably read it at least once a year the last four years, and each time, new things stand out. It’s one of Berry‘s Port William novels, and essentially the story of one woman’s life and the grief and gratitude present throughout. Having lost my dad last June, the theme of grief and how we experience it came through in a different way. Here are a few quotes from Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow, my two favorite fiction books (both by Wendell Berry), on grief and loss.
Hannah Coulter
“And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.”
“You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering.”
“I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”
Jayber Crow
“New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.”
“But the mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. After death and grief that (it seems) ought to have stopped the world, the world goes on. More things happen. And some of the things that happen are good. My life was changing now. It had to change. I am not going to say that it changed for the better. There was good in it as it was. But also there was good in it as it was going to be.”
“Troubled or not, grieved or not, you have got to live. And the facts of the case are even harder than that, for however troubled and grieved you may be, you will often find, looking back, that you were not living without enjoyment. That day had a trouble in it that would overwhelm its pleasure, though I did not yet know it.”
“After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”
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