Accessible writing on difficult themes, and so I moved deliberately and slowly. Thoughtful and well researched while balanced with personal experience and the insight that comes from paying attention to and processing lived trauma—with a friend, a parishioner, and in the writer's own life.

When I began reading, my life was still untouched by the Covid-19 pandemic. And then suddenly, reading about trauma, both personal and communal, became more overwhelming. The urgency of the question: Who are we and how do we relate to one another in the midst of, as well as after, collective trauma? became much more pressing.

Each chapter/essay offered perspectives I found helpful and/or thought provoking. I continue collecting language for my current body of work based on personal trauma and stories I'm telling myself about those experiences.

Many lines from the final chapter Mourning and Wonder, are now inscribed in my journal. Here is a small sample:

"Grief is hard, actually the hardest of all emotions and perhaps most intolerable because its demands are so excruciating. It requires a willingness to bear the unbearable. As morning, it requires turning private agony into public, shared loss. If you can learn to truly mourn, then there is at least the possibility of moving on. Not because the would is mending or traumatic scars suddenly vanish... The gift of mourning is that fully awakening to the depth of loss enables you to at least learn, perhaps for the first time, that you can hold loss: you can bear terrors of heart and body and still see your way forward with eyes open. 163 ( )

Very close to home ( )

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