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“Grief is the hardest emotion to describe, because so much of it is numbness; it is also passive, something one undergoes rather than something one undertakes. It becomes difficult to locate oneself. When Maria went missing, a part of me did too. My capacity for love, which had always seemed elusive and equivocal even to me, was bound up in my relationship with her. I discovered that after her death. I had not known it before. It is a familiar story. There is nothing original about pain.” — John Lanchester
Grief is the hardest emotion to describe, because so much of it is numbness; it is also passive, something one undergoes rather than something one undertakes. It becomes difficult to locate oneself. When Maria went missing, a part of me did too. My capacity for love, which had always seemed elusive and equivocal even to me, was bound up in my relationship with her. I discovered that after her death. I had not known it before. It is a familiar story. There is nothing original about pain.