worlds end all the time

Buried with my own hands five of my children in a single grave…No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.

Agniola di Tura, Siena, 1347, quoted in Connie Willis Doomsday Book.

Of course it was the end of the world. The world ended. Then it kept going.

Isn’t this the impossible task of grief, to watch the ended-world keep going?

One day my knee swelled to the size of a volleyball and I didn’t know it, but my world had ended by then. Ever since then, I’ve been a sick person. Worlds end all the time.

In White professional-class culture, you spend a lot of time trying not to sound overly dramatic.

I wonder how things would be different if we acknowledged that life is inherently dramatic. That phrases like “the end of the world” can be tools that help us accept and cope and carry on into the next world and the next end.

At the end of the world, it’s far more reasonable to be honest than to demand that each other live in pretended worlds.

Coming to grips with the end of the world, continuing to live with clear vision and broken hearts and wild voices, that is the grown-up thing to do.

More than that, it is how we and our children survive.