Grief is not a problem to fix, but a country we learn to live in. As Nick Cave writes in his Red Hand Letter #177, “grief and love are forever intertwined… grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love,” insisting that we stay in relationship with what (and whom) we have lost. Joan Didion reminds us in The Year of Magical Thinking that “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” and in that strange, altered place our old maps of life no longer quite work, so we have to listen differently, move more slowly, live more truthfully. From within this changed landscape we begin, as Francis Weller says in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, to discover that “the work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other,” letting sorrow and beauty sit side by side. In this way, grief does not teach us how to “get over” love; it shows us how to live with love in a new form, carrying our dead in our gestures and choices, and walking on with a little more honesty, a little more care.