#grief

#grief

You shouldn't have to convince your husband to follow through on your dream vacation. He should have consulted you before inviting your son and telling him he will be included in everything. You wrote that you scrimped and saved for years to afford this vacation. How does he intend to pay for all those extra expenses for a third person?

There's always something of a melancholy tinge to Thanksgiving, an unspoken, primal awareness not only that this is one final bacchanal before the privations of winter set in, but that gratitude can't really exist without the experience of grief. The things and the people we feel most thankful for are too often the ones that are no longer with us. Perhaps that helps explain why several new films this Thanksgiving season center on loss and how to move on from it.

I am an only child. My father was killed in a car accident when I was 14 and my mother was 47. We were really tightly bonded after that. She worked at a university and was an artist: she painted and carved birds. She was a wonderful person, who lit up a room and was someone everyone wanted to be around. She was very giving. Later in life, she developed dementia. I left my teaching position to stay home and look after her.

We wanted to have four, Kirk said. And I was praying to God that I was pregnant when he got murdered. Oh, wow. I thought of that once, Kelly said. Whether it was meant to be or whether we'd get news like that. I know, Kirk said while dabbing her eyes. I was like, oh, goodness, that was going to be the ultimate blessing out of this catastrophe.

With the season of Thanksgiving upon us, many of us instinctively reach for gratitude. We make lists, we gather with family, and we remind ourselves to appreciate what is good. But in recent years, gratitude feels harder to cultivate. And we are not imagining it. Psychologically, emotionally, and culturally, we are living through an unusually heavy time. We carry political conflicts that divide communities and family tables.

Simon and I couldn't be more different. When we met, I was 38, he was 54, and his unabashed zest for life broke through my complicated caution. I knew I was in love when, after a lazy summer evening together, I lay on the stone beside a Trafalgar Square fountain and felt joy seep through my skin. I moved in with him, his rural 15th-century cottage becoming our home, workplace (me in medicine, he in shipping), and where I discovered previously unknown contentment.

I was sitting on my sofa on a Saturday evening when I heard of Catriona's passing, having been in an unexpectedly foul mood earlier that day.

The loved ones we call the deaddepart from us and for a whileare absent. And then as ifcalled back by our love, they comenear us again. They enter our dreams.We feel they have been near uswhen we have not thought of them.They are simply here, simply waitingwhile we are distracted amongour obligations. At lastit comes to us: They live nowin the permanent world.We are the absent ones.

Pregnancy after loss is full of contradictions. It is hope that feels cautious, like it might dissolve if you breathe too hard. It is learning to live again inside a body that remembers grief. I am now officially in my third trimester, and each day brings small signs of life: a flutter, a roll, a hiccup, the steady rhythm of his heart.

When I packed up my New York apartment for the last time, it wasn't just a physical move. I was going through a profound emotional shift, a decision to rethink what success meant to me. A year prior, I had moved from Dallas to chase a dream editorial role, believing that life in the city would be the ultimate marker of success. But after a sudden layoff, the skyline that once inspired me started to feel like a cage.

Despite the joy Zimri brings Savoy, the fact that Zimri will never meet his grandfather compounds his grief, as does Zimri arriving into this world with serious health complications. So Savoy decided to capture this moment in time in a short documentary, also titled Big Bryce Son. Savoy hosts the documentary's Oakland premiere on Friday, Nov. 14, at Rhythm Section Art Lounge for two screenings at 7:30 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Infertility magnifies every communication challenge a couple already carries, as stress can distort our perception. Even simple differences of opinion can suddenly feel like rejection or blame. Spare me the Pain Our minds are wired to spare us from pain and uncertainty. Thought fallacies are the brain's way of managing that fear. When we face something unpredictable or beyond our control, the mind scrambles to restore order where none exists.

When I was pregnant, we moved to a new town, to a wreck of a house we planned to do up. My mum, who was ill, moved in with us, and then I was the carer of a newborn and a dying parent at the two extremes of life, but sharing many of the same needs, and often at the same time.

Knowing she would be undergoing treatments and needed the help, I quit my job to become a manager at one of her four centers. We had previously discussed my future involvement in the company and eventual takeover as director, so while her diagnosis hastened this plan, I felt like I was making the right decision at the time. With this plan, I could help her out while also transitioning into a leadership role.

How could I return to ordinary life after my son died? My grief was overwhelming, spilling into every task and coloring every interaction. Condolences triggered fresh crying jags. I wondered how my eyes could produce so many tears. Over time, however, my work began to draw me in again, demanding that I return to the scientific questions that had defined my career.

In Raymond Carver's classic short story "A Small, Good Thing" (you may also remember it from Robert Altman's Shortcuts), a mom orders a cake for her son's birthday party. Shortly after, the kid gets hit by a car on his way to school and falls into a coma. The baker, unaware of what's happened, keeps calling the birthday boys' parents and telling them to pick up the goddamn cake. And then-spoiler alert- the kid dies.

At his parents' house, there are family pictures everywhere, and I saw that Marie and I look very, very similar. Not just the physical features (though we have a lot of physical similarities, too. In the photos in their house, I could see more clearly that Marie's skin tone, hair color, and many of her facial features look a lot like mine), but also the mannerisms. The way she's acting in those photos reminded me a lot of myself.

I don't mean the obvious. There is fascism rotting not just our nation but the world, fascism so bad that common folk have begun calling it what it is and not just the communists and anarchists I spend most of my time with. The government shutdown, an event engineered by one party alone, exists solely to squeeze to death the programs they couldn't cancel the funding for through legal means, permanently crippling only the social subsidies that they deem unfit.

When they meet, explosively, Aggie is riding the tail end of the success of a bestselling memoir, and running out of money. Her marriage collapsed in the aftermath of their son's death in an accident, and Aggie's behaviour towards the young man she believes was responsible has landed her with a restraining order. I really grew to enjoy her company, says Danes.

[My grief] was coming out in ways that made me think, I need to take this away,