Welcome to Your Life

After the debris is cleared and before the crew arrives, a bare slab sits there and nothing seems to happen. John borrows a sixteenth-century phrase for that stretch and asks why it isn't a delay in the work. This one is about the part nobody can see from the street.

John's back gets a second hearing, with Robert Boyle in 1662 as his expert witness. He borrows the law as a picture: the amount of a loss is fixed, but the volume of the life holding it can grow. This one is about making your grief roomier instead of smaller.

John comes home from Dallas tired in a very particular way, and two words said quietly across a room explain why. He looks at what "me too" does for a person, and at why a sorrow still described in the third person has no one to grieve it. This one is about signing your name to a loss.

The same ruined sofa has two prices on a claim form, and grief has only ever accepted one of them. John walks through a fifteen-minute exercise with three columns, one sheet of paper, and a single word per line, no matter how heavy it gets. This one is about giving a loss a size.

Every other year John hosts a conference full of people who have lost families and churches without a single death. He looks at what a funeral actually does, and at how a loss becomes legitimate the moment one person treats it as real. This one is about the one person who says it counts.

A front moves through and my back files a complaint before the forecast does. This episode looks at the order recovery crews follow after a storm, from safety to repair, and what it says about grief that moves back and forth. This one is about going through a loss instead of around it.

After a storm, a stranger with a clipboard asks what was in the house, and almost nobody can answer. John looks at why a loss you can't list is a loss you can't rebuild from, and at what happens in the brain when a feeling gets a word. This one is about the first step, which is a name.

In 2003 a man in St. Louis painted a bicycle white and chained it where a cyclist had been hit, with permission from no one. John closes the week with that bicycle and the four ways a loss gets denied standing. This one is about the loss that has no marker yet.

Your access gets revoked at 5:01pm, and nobody mentions it at the retirement party. John looks at the endings we throw cake at, and at the threshold nobody marks anymore, from the empty nest to the last day of a career. This one is about the ending that came with a celebration and no permission to be sad.

Psalm 88 is the one psalm that never turns toward hope, and somebody kept it in the book on purpose. John looks at why a loss of faith -- or even a deconstruction of it -- gets repaired or ignored but rarely mourned, and at Mother Teresa's private darkness.