A dead fish lies still on a chopping board, its rear end sliced off, scales scattered across the wood. One animated eye and open mouth make it look as though it might slither off the table. This is 's Fish Still Life (1950), a small, ghostly painting that is currently on show in Alice NeelStill Lifes and Street Scenes, a new exhibition at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.
For more than 11 years, I told myself it was too early to grieve. My father, Ali Mustafa, was arrested by Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria on 2 July 2013 and disappeared. Since that day, we have had no word, no trace, nothing. Every morning since he was taken I made my first thought after waking up: He is alive. Every night I went to sleep repeating it.
These boys were playing for Colebrook Royals, a football club in Chigwell, Essex. It was 2019 and they were in the dressing room before team practice for a photoshoot arranged by the charity YoungMinds. The plan was that, after the photos, the boys would speak to two dads Nick Easey and Ryan Smith who had lost their teenage sons to suicide. The fathers wanted the boys to share their own feelings about mental health, to normalise such conversations,
Before the end of her marriage to alt-country darling Jason Isbell became a reality in December 2023, singer-songwriter and The Highwomen member Amanda Shires imagined its possibility on "Fault Line," from her 2022 album Take It Like a Man. Despondently etching out a rough patch the modern-day Johnny and June had endured, Shires sang as though underwater. As she envisioned how to answer the inevitable questions she'd get about their split, her voice slumped with exhaustion: "I'll say what's true/I don't know."
When I showed the photo to my friend, her reaction left me speechless. She practically threw the phone down and said, What an ugly family! Your mother is ugly and fat, and your father is ugly, too! She continued with more of the same. Other than that, she's a kind and giving friend. I can't get over what she said because I know I'm ugly and I hate being so. But if we were so offensive, why would she be friends with me?
On more than one occasion, I have watched my mother regale the room with a truly awful story involving a family cat and its botched pregnancy. I won't belabor the details-trust me, you don't want to hear them—but, basically, when I was young, a cat we owned that had been previously spayed somehow became fecund with a litter of kittens. This required veterinary intervention, since the
I have just finished reading Elizabeth Gilbert's new book and, like most of the internet, I have thoughts. Before I dive in though, let me tell you where I stand on Gilbert because after over two decades in the public eye, three novels, four memoirs, two film adaptations and millions upon millions of dollars, Gilbert is literary Marmite.
Instead of talking to her about your concerns which she may or may not share pick one part of her inheritance and ask her if she'd like your help in dealing with it. The van is probably the easiest place to start. Tell her that you've noticed she doesn't drive it, and you have some ideas about what to do with it, if she's open.
As I've shared before, when I was 12, I was playing at a friend's house one hot August afternoon when I was told I was needed at home. As I turned into my long driveway, I saw the lights of an ambulance, a stretcher being loaded into the back. The doors slammed shut. The whirling lights threw red streaks across the oaks as it sped past me out of our driveway. No one noticed the small, pale, immobilized girl standing by the mailbox.
I met Donny 18 months ago. For a while, we were both happy. Then suddenly, every Friday, Donny would make some excuse, smoke a cigarette and go to the bar across the street. Afterward, he would show up here drunk, and we would argue. When Donny was sober, he was a great guy, but every weekend he disappeared. Although I tried every day to help him, the drinking evolved into drugs. A few months ago, he came over to visit.
And so this piece of art you see behind us, we wanted to have a place in an alley like this where people who are on the street can come anytime of day or night to grieve those who they've lost. This is a memorial wall for those types of people. And we think it's really important. And the hand prints are there to say: We are here, we have been here.
When it gets close to my menstrual cycle, he gets into an angry panic for us to be intimate because he travels for work and is home only four nights a week. If we're not able to, he pouts, then becomes angry and distant, and peppers me for updates to determine how soon we can resume intimacy. Regardless of how I feel at my time of the month, my feelings are ignored.
The question of whether there's a science to grief comes at a time when prolonged grief disorder is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a medical condition treatable by drugs. DSM-5 TR (2022)defines extended grief in adults as lasting more than one year, and in children and adolescents for more than six months. For a diagnosis to occur, the grief should "last longer than might be expected based on social, cultural, or religious norms."
I visited the hospital regularly, bringing cookies and offering support to his girlfriend, who is also in the program. During my last visit, I unknowingly arrived at the exact moment doctors began withdrawing life support. I had no idea it was going to happen and witnessed the kind of raw grief that comes in moments like that. Afterward, I hugged his girlfriend and quietly left.
For "The Cortège" approaches a difficult subject matter with an imaginative question: What if we explore grief not with isolation or solemness, but with wonder? It's a prompt that's ripe for an era of divisive politics, financial stress and often isolating technology. Beginning at twilight and extending into the evening, "The Cortège" starts with an overture, a six-piece band performing in the center of the field. We're seated either on the grass on portable pads with backs or in folding chairs on an elevated platform.
The problem is that if there is only a focus on celebrating this life-or an entry into a next life-we deny and disenfranchise the legitimate grief that mourners experience. Someone loved has died. Whatever comfort is offered by the nature of the life and legacies of the deceased-or the beliefs of an afterlife, however defined-does not change that in funerals mourners gather to say goodbye to someone they loved.
Whatever you're feeling right now is what you should be feeling right now. If you're sad and depressed, fine. If you're often angry, good. If you can't feel anything, well, that's okay too. If you're stressed, worried, and feeling all the feels, so be it. There's no wrong way to feel about losing your child. You can't f--- it up any worse than it already is.
Her impending reappearance on the morning show was announced by her co-host, Savannah Guthrie, who revealed that Jones, 47, will take part in an emotional interview about the loss of her spouse on Sept. 5. In a preview clip from the sit-down, Jones could be seen opening up about how she and her kids have been processing their grief, while explaining why she views his death as a "beautiful nightmare."
Ever since Arundhati Roy's writing made her famous after her first novel won her the Booker Prize nearly 30 years ago, she's used her words and her celebrity to write on injustice, minority rights and the human condition. And that's been met with wrath and attempted censorship from the Hindu nationalist government in her native India. She's been found guilty of contempt by the country's Supreme Court and is currently facing prosecution for something she said over a decade ago under the country's anti-terrorism law.
It's August and my mom is moving. My dad passed away a little less than a year ago, and after a slog of a winter living in the house they once shared, Mom decided that she wouldn't tolerate another one. So she found a townhouse close to my sister's house: small, airy, and bright. It was perfect. It was also empty.
"I left [the United Kingdom] on the 13th of July," he said [as transcribed by Blabbermouth]. "I came home [to Los Angeles], and, yeah, my dad was great. He was in a good mood. He was happy. [On July 22] I woke up in Los Angeles to a knock on my house door at around 3:45 in the morning. Someone who's worked for my family for probably 30 years now was knocking on my door, and when I looked through my window and I saw it was him, I just knew something bad had happened. And I was informed that my father had passed."
My grandmother passed away a few years ago after a long battle with cancer. Even as her health deteriorated, she never lost her spirit. She'd still get excited about whether the Pittsburgh Steelers might finally have a decent season after Ben Roethlisberger's retirement. She'd debate the Pirates' chances with the kind of passionate optimism that only comes from decades of loyal disappointment.
Loved One and Consider Yourself Kissed have a lot in common. They both largely take place in London (in the same neighborhood, even); their plots center on women around 30 navigating relationships with men; they're dense with references (mostly pop culture for Loved One, mostly British politics for Consider Yourself Kissed); they both have titles and covers that make them seem like much more light-hearted or frivolous books than they actually are.
Rising from my seat at the front table, a familiar acid burn crawls up my throat. It's that failure lump I've carried for the past 16 months. Today is somber. My late wife Jane's celebration of life. She died just over a month ago after a 15‑month battle with leukemia. More than 250 friends and family members fill the room, waiting for me to deliver her eulogy.
'I got woken up by a massive thump on the shoulder. So I opened my eyes, and I could see next to my bed a very vague hazy version of Robin as if he was pushing himself through treacle to be seen, and I was just transfixed, and I could see him become more and more clear, I could see the outline of his hair and his face, but he suddenly just dissolved from the top down.'
One of the things that makes this so hard is that both you and Sue are hurting but you're hurting in different ways and for different reasons. Those differences have made it difficult for you to align, but it's not impossible. It sounds like, when Sue told you that you don't know what it's like, she was attempting to communicate something very complex. And while it may not have seemed like it at the time, I think it was her attempt to let you in.
A few months after Gerry Ryan died in 2010, fellow radio star Ian Dempsey saw his widow, Morah. It was across a crowded room at a function in The Mansion House in Dublin. "I hadn't seen her for ages," Dempsey says. "I waved over at her like a mad thing. Unfortunately, it was in the middle of a charity auction and I found myself bidding on a weekend in New York..."
In it, Wiman looks back on the violence that marked both his childhood in West Texas and his family's history, and seems to gather that his past made his writing career inevitable. His conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive, because when he first began reading poetry, in college, he believed that "it had absolutely nothing to do with the world I was from." But he no longer believes that assumption was entirely accurate.
Not all the politicking on Gung Ho landed right Stange Messengers is unbearably clumsy but Glitter in Their Eyes' plea for a younger generation not to get hooked on materialism is impressively punchy and potent, abetted by the presence on guitar of her old sparring partner, Television's Tom Verlaine. Like its predecessor, Gone Again, Peace and Noise was an album awash with loss and mourning.
It's only this year, at the age of 26, that I've had a grandparent - my maternal grandmother - die. It was hard at first to believe that she was gone. My nan lived two or three miles away from my family while I was growing up, so we saw her regularly. After my parents, she was the person who cared for me and my sister the most growing up. Because of this, it felt as though a part of my childhood died with her.
Blame George Orwell, who in 1946 famously published "Why I Write," an essay contending with the motives of "political purpose" and "aesthetic enthusiasm," which fueled his career, even while noting that the decision to put pen to paper is in some ways inexplicable. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness," Orwell wrote.
Lately, I've been seeing it everywhere - people using AI for company, for comfort, for therapy and, in some cases, for love. A partner who never ghosts you, always listens? Honestly, tempting. So I downloaded an app which lets you design your ideal AI companion - name, face, personality, job title, everything. I created Javier, a yoga instructor, because nothing says safe male energy like someone who reminds you to breathe and doesn't mind holding space for your inner child.
Emotions are not just fleeting reactions; they are essential guides for human connection and survival. Whether through the quiet ache of grief or the unexpected flood of tears in moments of joy, our emotional expressions reveal what matters most. Crying, in particular, speaks to this paradox: It can soothe inner tension, signal a need for support, or mark the overwhelming beauty of love and meaning. In this way, both sorrow and joy become invitations, reminders that feeling deeply is not a weakness,
