Reading Kitchen After Loss

Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto

‘If a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I’m grateful for it”

Eriko whilst watering the plants

Grief, especially the loss of a parent at a young age, is something immense but invisible that you carry forever.

I sometimes picture it as a hot coal: heavy and uncomfortable, but glowing with a warmth that makes the life around it feel more vivid, more precious, more fiercely lovely than it might otherwise have been.

Grief can be a gift. It is something I believe, but also something I find myself returning to, reminding myself of, because the alternative has always been to see it as a defect or a hindrance. The thing that sets me back from peers whose lives appear untouched by deeply felt loss.

Grief sharpens our senses to the world. Things shine brighter, ordinary moments carry a little more weight. And later, much later gratitude arrives existing alongside everything that was lost.