As someone still swimming around in grief, I found comfort in reading Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (possibly my third reading?). I find this particular paragraph from the book to be quite softening for me:
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.” “
I made this painterly caricature tribute to Vonnegut. I wish I could send it to him, apparently he used to be quite warm toward his fans. But his body is in a bad condition at this moment in time.
