A few years after my husband Jeff died, I decided to collect the writings I had done during the year that I spent in delicious solitude upon his passing. I published this collection and called it “This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation” — for that is what it was. Both. An extraordinary year of what I called “conscious grieving” — and I would say now that it was perhaps the deepest and most meaning-full in my entire 70-plus years. I continue to feel endless gratitude for Jeff’s full presence in my life, both before and after he “died.”
In that manuscript, I reflected upon how our culture’s terror of grief, aging, dying and death has torqued life into a forced “smiley face” caricature, and kept us from not only understanding, but accepting and celebrating the life cycle as a whole. So I’m very happy to see that a new generation, utilizing tools native to them, now begins to dismember the old, stiff, stuck paradigm.
An Online Generation Redefines Mourning
March 21, 2014
by Hannah Seligson
nyt via Ted
Excerpt:
For a generation known for broadcasting internal monologue across the Internet, some of its members seem eager for spaces to express not just the good stuff that litters everyone’s Facebook newsfeed, but also the painful. In November, Melissa Lafsky Wall, 35, the founder of New York-based Brick Wall Media, turned to Modern Loss after a miscarriage, posting an essay called “The Silent Sorrow.” “The Internet should speak to the parts of life that we all experience, but aren’t represented in most media, a large one being grief and loss,” Ms. Wall said, adding that the feedback she got was all positive, which she attributes to the site. “If you are going to write about your miscarriage on Reddit, for instance, it’s going to be a very different community.”
