Things in Nature Merely Grow

My notes

Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.

Dying is hard. Living is harder. Even harder is living on when life is fractured by timeless deaths.

If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.

There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life.

Better stop asking these questions that tread in the realm of alternatives—whatever the answer is doesn’t make a difference in this life.

Clichés are not merely flabby words used to express unimaginative thoughts; rather, clichés corrode the mind. Flabby language begetting flabby thinking seems a more alarming prospect than the opposite, flabby thinking finding refuge in flabby language.

A Sisyphus making a boulder out of a pebble would only become a comedy.

is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?

we all live in stories that cannot be fully told; very few people in the world deserve our tears.

not all of them treat me as the intellectual equal of my old self.

The gap between worth doing and being able to do is where aspiration dwells for the young and decline lies in wait for the old.

But wishes are but artificial flowers.

Those who have learned swimming in their childhood tend to swim unthinkingly. For some people, the same must be true in life; for them living is a natural process. This has never been the case for me or for my children.

I think about counting days and marking time, and my thoughts, inevitably, return to my children. That a mother can no longer mother her children won’t change the fact that her thoughts are mostly a mother’s thoughts.