8 Quotes by Tembi Locke

But I had learned that identity is prismatic, that belonging requires claiming.

Yet nothing about dying was easy. Not for him nor for me. It was labor, as much labor as coming into this world.

Cooking is about surrender.

I made other promises too, the kind of promises the living make to the dying when we have the sudden realization that we are all- in fact the dying. That life is fleeting capable of bending the other way at any moment. We reach hard for life.

All the strength I had gathered as a woman, mother, and lover wilted, instantly and completely. It was like being flung onto jagged rocks at low tide, belly up at high noon on the longest, hottest day of the longest year of your life. There seemed no bottom to my grief, no way out, just through. Through darkness, isolation, and the deprivation of his touch.

I was witnessing another example of the way community functioned so tightly here, for better or for worse. Each of the women on this street will be called upon and expected to participate in the illness or death of the others. They held one another up, it was a custom as ancient and alive as the ruins of Sicily's Harrah temple.

What if my own life was like a flower? Something I had to continually tend to and nurture. Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery, as an act of remembrance, had additional meaning. Maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro's love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.

We had to begin at an ending and make a new beginning.