"A Grief Ago" by Peter Leyland
"A Grief Ago" * It’s the thing with feathers, as Max Porter puts it in his book about grief, although Emily Dickinson also used the phrase to talk about hope. Recently I was attending a book group to discuss The Master by Colm To ibin. As it happened, I had just read his article A Grief Observed where he refers to the stories of Mary Levin. In those stories he says, a newly widowed woman has to re-invent some new rules of life for herself after her husband's death. Toibin then recalls how after the death of his father there was a silence around grief and that reading Mary Lavin's stories gave him something to relate to. This rang a bell with me and as I read the rest of his article the titles of two books came into my mind which had helped me to deal with grief at two significant points in my life. The books were The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne and Victory by Joseph Conrad. As many of us do, I had difficulty dealing with th...