There is the life you imagined. And then there is the life that follows loss.
On June 9, 2021, my 19-year-old daughter Kamila died suddenly. We were deeply close. Losing her was a devastation that felt impossible to survive.
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After that day, nothing made sense. The world I thought I was living in disappeared, and I found myself in a landscape of grief I had never known existed.
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Out of Order is where I try to speak from inside that landscape. It is an attempt to give language to the disorientation of grief—to what it feels like to keep living when the future you imagined has been torn away.
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Here, I write honestly about loss, love, and the strange work of continuing on after everything has changed.
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If you are living with devastating loss, you are not alone here.
The Thing Is
BY ELLEN BASS
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
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