1Everything I have, I have for a while. This is not a sad saying. It is only the terms. Nobody was ever offered other terms.
2The Keepers speak of walking the dark road before night. I do it like this. In a quiet hour, I let myself think: this house may burn. This strength will go. This person I love will one day not answer when I call. I do not hurry past the thought. I walk the whole length of it, slowly, as one walks a road by day to learn where the stones are. Then I come back, and the house is standing, and she is in the next room, singing. I see her as I did not see her an hour ago.
3I do not walk the dark road to love less. I walk it so as not to be asleep. The one who has never once imagined the empty chair does not truly see who is sitting in it.
4And when night does come, I have been on this road before. I know it can be walked. That does not take the dark away, though it does take away the fear that I will not get through.
5I lost a thing: a tool, a ring, a sum of money. See what remains. My hands, my judgment and my people are all still here. The ways the thing opened for me are closed, and that is a real loss; let me not pretend otherwise. But I was a whole person before I had it. I did not become half a person when it went.
6We count what the flood took. Count also what it left.
7The house burned. For three days I could think of nothing but what was in it. On the fourth day my neighbour brought bread, and his son brought a blanket, and a woman I hardly knew brought a pot. I had lived beside these people for twenty years and had not known what they were. It took a fire to show me the walls I really live inside.
8Money lost is the lightest of losses, though it does not feel so on the night. It is the one loss that the Near Hand may be able to make good.
9A friend has turned away from me, and I do not know why. Ask once, plainly, and listen. If there is something to mend, mend it. If he will not say, or will not stay, then his going is in the Far Hand. Leave the door on the latch and get on with the day. I will not help anything by sitting at the window.
10When someone I love goes through the Last Door, grief comes. Let it. Grief is not a failure of the teaching. It is the Seeing of what has closed. A whole world of ways went with them: every talk we would have had, every morning. If I did not feel that, I would not be wise, only blind.
11I will not tell the mourner that all is well. It is not. A person is gone, and nothing else in all the Whole is that person. I will only say what is true: that what they opened stays open. The child they taught can still read. The tree is still in the yard. The kindness they did me is still working in me, and through me in people they never met. The door closed for one. It did not close on what that one did.
12Do not say to the grieving, "Be strong." Do not hand them a saying. Bring soup. Sit down. Speak the name of the one who is gone, because everyone else is afraid to, and they are hungry to hear it.
13How long should grief last? As long as it lasts. But there are two kinds, and in time I must tell them apart. One is love that is finding its new shape. The other is a room I have decided to live in. The first changes from month to month, like a river working its way to the sea. The second does not change. If my grief is the same in its third year as in its third week, I should ask, gently, whether I am still mourning them, or have begun keeping a shrine to my own sorrow.
14There is anger in grief. At the healer, at the dead one for leaving, at the Whole. Let it pass through, and do not give it a target. Nobody did this to me. The Weave is not cruel, any more than the tide is cruel. It only has no face.
15There is guilt in grief. The words I did not say. The visit I put off. Hear it out, for some of it is true. Then take the true part and spend it on the living. There are people I can still visit this week.
16The best mourning is to carry on what they opened. She fed whoever came to the door. Then feed whoever comes. He told the truth when it cost him. Then tell it. That way they are not only remembered. Their work goes on being done.
17A child has died. I have nothing to write under this. No saying fits. A whole unlived life has closed, with every way it held, and no reckoning makes it small. If the teaching is of use here, it is of use later, and quietly. There are other children. The love has to go somewhere, and they are there.
18I have failed at the thing I gave years to. The work is in pieces and everyone knows. Now, plainly: what is lost? The thing I built. What is not lost? The one who learned how to build. That one is worth more than before, if he does not spend the next years staring at the pieces.
19A failure tells me where a wall is. It is costly knowledge and I have already paid for it. The only waste would be not to use it.
20Loss of place. I was the one people came to; now they go to someone younger. I am tempted to stand in the doorway and be bitter. But the work is going on, and it was the work that mattered, or so I always said. Now I find out whether I meant it.
21Age takes things one at a time, so politely that each seems small. First the far sight, then the fast walk, then a name here and there. Do not rage at each. Do not pretend it is not happening, either. Say goodbye to each thing as it goes, as to a guest who stayed a good while, and turn back to those still at the table.
22To be driven from one's own country is a great loss. The streets I knew, the tongue I joked in, the graves. Yet I have seen exiles who carried their whole country in how they cooked and sang and treated a guest, and I have seen people who never left home and belonged nowhere. Some of what I call my place is ground. More of it is a way of doing things, and that goes with me.
23To be betrayed by one I trusted is two losses. I lose the person, and I lose the past, for now I must go back over every good day and ask if it was false. Do not do that. The good days were good when they happened. What he did later cannot reach back and spoil the bread we ate.
24My good name was taken by a lie. That is the Far Hand; a name is only what is said. But the thing the name was for, the kind of person I am, was never in anyone's mouth. It is here. Nobody took it. In time a name tends to drift back toward the thing, though slowly, and not always while I live.
25What can loss not reach? What I have already done. The meal I shared is shared. The truth I told is told. The child I taught has been taught. These are in the past now, and for this purpose the past is a strongbox. No thief or fire can get in. No one is able to make it so that I did not do them.
26So if I want something that cannot be taken from me, I should not gather, because whatever is gathered can be scattered. I should do, because what is done stays done.
27A hand that grips cannot hold water. Cup it, and the water stays a while. Hold what I love like that. It will not make me lose it later or sooner. It only makes me able to drink.
28Saying yes to the Weave: I have been slow to learn what this means. It does not mean liking what happened. It does not mean calling loss a gain. It means I stop demanding that the Whole be other than it is before I will agree to live in it. This is the world. It is the only one, and it holds everything I ever loved. Loss is in it too, because nothing in it stands still, and a world that stood still would have had no room for her to be born.
29The same turning that takes things away brought every one of them. I cannot have the river only when it flows toward me.
30Why did this happen to me? There is no why of that kind. It happened. Rain does not choose roofs. The question that has an answer is the other one: what now is mine to do?
31Small losses are practice. The cup that broke. The plan the rain spoiled. The seat someone took. If I can say of these, "Well, that is gone, now what?", I am building the strength I will need on the day it is not a cup.
32Others have lost more and gone on. I do not say this to shame myself. I say it as one says, looking at a hard pass, "People have crossed here." It tells me that it can be crossed.
33Do not take comfort to the grieving too soon. A wound must bleed a little before it is bound.
34There is a loss with no funeral: the life I did not live. The road not taken, the word not said in time, the person I might have been had I been braver at twenty. I may mourn it, briefly. But that person never was, and I am here now. All the ways that are still open are open from here.
35I mourn for what I have lost as if it had been mine by right, and had been taken. But I did not earn the sun, or my sight, or thirty years with my friend. They came, and they came freely. If I must do sums, the sum is thirty years more than I was owed.
36After a great loss the world goes on, and at first that seems an insult. The baker bakes. Children shout in the lane. How dare they? Later it is the first comfort. The baker bakes. The children are still shouting. There is something left to belong to.
37Those who have lost much are often the gentlest. They know what everyone is carrying. I would not have chosen my losses. But I would not now give back what they taught my hands.
38The anniversary comes round and knocks me flat when I thought I was well. This is not going backward. Grief does not travel a straight road. It comes round the mountain again and again, a little higher each time, and I pass the same view.
39Am I hiding from a loss by keeping busy? Work is a good friend in sorrow and it is a poor hiding place. Whatever I have not looked at waits for me, and it grows.
40They are gone, and I can no longer do anything for them. This is the bitter centre of it. But see what follows: all I can still do, I can only do for the living. They have not handed me a memory to guard. They have handed me my own days back, with a use for them.
41I have noticed that I grieve most where I shared least. Something was left unfinished. With the ones I truly spent myself on, told the truth to, and thanked, there is sorrow, but it is clean. So the way to make ready for loss is not to hold back. It is to hold nothing back.
42One day I will be someone else's loss. Let me live so that when they come to walk that road, what they find along it is mostly thanks.
43Everything is taken in the end, and the taking of the last thing is the Last Door. So I can keep nothing. I can only use it well while it is in my hand, and hand on what can be handed. The ember was never mine. I am only the one keeping it warm for now.
44I have buried people I love. I was not broken by it, and I was not unmoved. I believe that is as much as the teaching promises. It does not put a wall around the heart. It gives me a floor under my feet.