The Joy Menu

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But it also eats away at a more core belief around who I am, and how this project negates or reaffirms my identity: if I truly were a writer, then I would drop everything and follow his lead...
What matters is, I tucked them away; aware of their power but not of what they were. Honored, confused, horrified, excited.
Introducing The Joy Menu, a narrative newsletter exploring death, loss, grief, art, and creativity.
#71. And in writing about this grief – grief for him, and grief for myself as an artist – I renovated my relationship to art.

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And at every juncture, each time I saw a doctor or a specialist or a nurse or a phlebotomist, they’d ask “And the pain?”
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“It is forgetfulness that is the fundamental problem, not memory.” — Patrick Modiano
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In a way, while the sale was open, while the cello remained unsold, part of my father remained alive. Far from view, over the crest of the horizon, but…
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“Hey boychik,” the refined voice on the other side of the world says. “How’s school? How’s soccer? How’s the cello?”
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Perhaps there was comfort in the constriction, a perverse safety in the pressure. Perhaps the door served as a weighted blanket – protection from…
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That was the drug, I think. That liminality, that escape, that floating, etherial disconnection — or re-connection. I wonder: how many lives did he live…
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Tears, too, like any precipitation, find their way out of one sea and into another. It all gets washed away.
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This is a memory. But it is also a thousand memories. It can be repeated so many times, only the fruit changes, the game we play, the location where we…
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The Joy Menu

writing grief, grieving writing; or, a life in 100 emails.

The Joy Menu

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