In a matter of hours, seven out of the eight blocks at a subsidised home-ownership residential complex, which were undergoing renovation, were destroyed in Tai Po. More than one hundred people, including a firefighter, were confirmed dead. Many were missing.
I have been thinking a lot about a quote that is probably attributed to Julian Barnes: "Grief is vertical while mourning is horizontal." Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood supply to the brain; mourning blows you in a new direction.
There are no fixed "right" or "wrong" ways to grieve. But it is not just telling people to "get over it" or "move on." I just finished a short novel One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid. That is a story of Emma who was left a widow after her husband's helicopter went down somewhere over the Pacific. All passengers were supposed to be killed in the fatal crash. What could be found were a propeller of the helicopter on the shore of an island, and her husband's backpack. And the body of the pilot.
Emma wore the grief like a shell. She found herself wearing it for a long time and then one day she realised she had outgrown it. So she put it down and walked away, only coming back to visit every once in a while. Somehow, this wasn't what she expected. The shell turned out to be heavier than she expected. Too heavy to be easily put down.
No comments:
Post a Comment