How to Be Thankful for Loss
Monday, October 10, 2022
Today we Canucks celebrate Thanksgiving.
With only three weeks now since my wife's passing, it's hard to feel grateful after experiencing the loss of a twenty-year relationship. Here is a picture of Nicole at our last holiday gathering (Christmas 2021) with our son and her mother...
In nature, loss is an essential element of creation—the rose blossoms, the bud is lost; the plant sprouts, the seed is lost; the day begins, the night is lost. In all cases, loss sets the stage for further creation (or, more accurately, re-creation).
So it is in human life. It's hard to look back on any gain in life that does not have a loss attached to it.
So it is in human life. It's hard to look back on any gain in life that does not have a loss attached to it.
Nicole told me that grieving her loss would enable me to write more from the heart, creating novels that dive beneath the mechanistic, rational view we pretend to have about our time here on earth.
So I'll try to be thankful for that.
—John C. A. Manley
PS I'm also thankful for her parting gift to me.
PPS And I'm also thankful for the 200+ emails of support from all you readers of my blog. And, especially, for all of you who have supported my work by purchasing Much Ado About Corona for yourself, your friends and family (and maybe even a few of your masked, vaxed and sanitized neighbours).
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/
