We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or “We are all constantly cheating death.

Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she's gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula, has no top and no bottom, "just circles and circles of sorrow.

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.

Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come. During the time my mother was sick, I found myself crying uncontrollably over the deaths of people I barely knew.