Grief

This is a lovely passage from the novel 'On Love' by Alain de Botton, which I think really helps to understand the process of grief and loss...

"There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. 

While most of us are led by the strict demands of diaries and timetables, the soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.... 

The camel became lighter and lighter as it walked through time, it kept shaking memories and photos off its back, scattering them over the desert floor and letting the wind bury them in the sand, and gradually the camel became so light that it could trot again and even gallop in its own curious way 

- until one day, in a small oasis that called itself the present, the exhausted creature finally caught up with the rest of me."

- On Love, Alain de Botton