In the August 16, 2018 issue of the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich opened her review and appreciation of Aretha Franklin’s work with the following sentence. I haven’t read anything since that better frames the challenge of thinking one’s self through and past grief–over a death, defeat, loss, or Alzheimer’s diagnosis–and back into the stream of life.
The eternal challenge is to answer grief with something that resembles love. To choose not just to sit around decrying hardship and injustice but instead to uncurl your fists and approach sorrow with grace, power, and, most incredibly, gratitude—not for the hurt itself but for the whole miraculous mess of being alive, this strange endowment of breath and blood.
Amanda Petrusich, “Aretha Franklin is as Immortal as Can Be”