From Meghan O'Rourke's magnificent meditation on the messiness of mourning and how we learn to live with loss:
It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.
See more here – an enlivening read for everyone who has ever lost a loved one or ever will, which is pretty much all of us.