5 Quotes by Marion Coutts

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.

Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying.

How do we recognise another person? At its most basic, by shape, by colour, by outline, by dark and light, by smell. Or by nuances of tone, by the way the face looks in repose, the cadences of the voice, full of small interior knowledge, the way they hold their mouth while listening, or the way their gaze holds yours. By what their eyes say when they are not speaking.

Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world.

Two days after your death, in a dream you text me many times. I read the first of them. ME! And so are the living comforted.