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Reviews tagging 'Suicide'
The Dark Interval: Letters for the Grieving Heart by Rainer Maria Rilke
4 reviews
clarabooksit's review against another edition
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief
Moderate: Suicide, Death of parent, and Death
Minor: War
invavine's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.
Like Ulrich Baer sought out Rilkes letters after his fathers death and found comfort in them, i too, came to find this book after someone close to me had died.
I felt angry and helpless and a deep echoing kind of desperation, when i started reading:
this book didn’t magically make this better, but i am so glad i read it nonetheless.
It felt like Rilke slowly put pieces of my soul back together, one letter at a time.
By the end i felt like i could do the rest on my own, like i could keep on breathing through the pain.
Rilke talks about death and grief with such empathy and understanding, with personal anecdotes, that never feel like he is taking up too much space, that it is hard to not be soothed by his words.
Rilke didn’t believe in ignoring pain, but he also didn’t condone getting swallowed up by it.
You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you.
Someones death doesn’t erase your love for them. What is grief but your love for someone persevering?
Carrying someone's memory inside of you after they die, keeping them alive through you, is a concept i will fold into my skin.
Just think how much in our daily lives misleads and troubles us, and renders another person’s love imprecise for us. But now he is definitely here, now he is completely free to be here and we are completely free to feel him…
Rilke is never intrusive in his comfort, he even admits himself, that it is almost impossible to truly comfort someone in mourning, that all you can do is listen and be there.
for nobody comes close to true assistance and consolation, except by an act of grace.
I don’t think i can put into words how glad i am to have read this book, how thankful i am for having found it, for it existing at all.
Content Warnings
Minor: Suicide
chaimasg93's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
what had died for me, so to speak, had died into my own heart. When I looked for the person who had passed away, he gathered inside of me in peculiar and such surprising ways, and it was deeply moving to feel that he now existed only there.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: Suicide
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