when brief is relational, as an almost almost always…

Page 74 when brief is relational, as an almost almost always, is, grieving well, is working through the change, that the relationship undergoes. Change, that is not the end. In an essay on the death of friends and older age, the American philosopher, Samuel Scheffler, introduced rival vocabulary for relationships that are no longer active. In complete relationships, like my relationship with jewels, the other remains alive. In archived relationships, she has died. Even completed relationships are not entirely over, I have a different jewel than I have two perfect strangers.

— from The Landing (Death) · Life is hard bykieran setiya

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Psychologists describe the healthy path through it as a kind of oscillation, a moving back and forth between facing the loss and stepping back to keep living. The work of grieving well is not to end the relationship but to let it become the changed thing it now has to be; the loss is not an experience to be surmounted and filed away but an event to live alongside, and, when you are able, to grow from. The Stoic Epictetus knew how hard this is even for the wise — he taught that if we could truly inhabit the truth that what we love is perishable, we would outwit grief, and then admitted how rarely any of us manage it. — The Landing (Death)

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