In the Midst of Winter: Selections from the Literature of Mourning Book

The author lost a spouse and decided to create an anthology of some of the literature she looked at--essays, poems, short stories--on the various stages of mourning. As she states in her preface, her selections can be read in any order. She tries to group them by theme. Her selections go all the way back to ancient China, Japan and Greece. People have been mourning for a long, long time. We don't always mourn the loss of a loved one, of course. We mourn the passing of years, of loss of childhood scenes, of memories, of friendships, of workplace associations, of mentors, of communities we once knew, of faith. So much of what makes us human--the desire for novelty, for escape, for freshness--works against our own accompanying desire for consistency, for continuity, for security, for holding on to the moment for just a little longer. We wish the stream would stop, but it just keeps on flowing. If it did stop, the life-giving renewal it provides would stop as well. We all want to move on, but grief reminds us to take stock of what we have lost, and what we we have experienced before it, or the person, was taken from us. We have to value others, value their many tangible and intangible qualities, in order to have a sense of what our own value is to others. We cannot close our hearts to pity. Numbness is not an enviable condition. It merely blinkers our own receptivity, and may actually hasten our own destruction, because it also closes us off to danger signals. If we cannot feel, we deny our humanity.