The Joy Menu

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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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Introducing The Joy Menu, a narrative newsletter exploring death, loss, grief, art, and creativity.
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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 alive.
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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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Somewhere, a dog barks. Another responds. Chickens, twenty yards to the right, shake and pluck and cluck in their open pen. Or maybe I’ve just added…
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If he had lived a fabulously long life, my grandfather would have turned 95 fifteen days later.
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But there is also a masculinity of fear. There is also a masculinity of curdled intimacy.
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The Joy Menu

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

The Joy Menu

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