The Disposed Griever

"How many people grieving a serious loss discover that the public's tolerance for the continuance of their grief is short and shortly unsympathetic. ("Get over it, already.") But true friendship remains through the more boring, repetitive extensions of sorrows even after the excitement of the new crisis is past. The public-- when it is confronted with an unfinished grief long after it, the public, has finished with the griever-- begins to avoid her as a nuisance, and to blame her as a mope too much in love with her black weeds."

Walter Wangerin, Jr. Letters from the Land of Cancer (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 124.