Quotes from Emily Rapp

Grief weighs nothing but you still have to drag it around.

Ronan taught me that children do not exist to honor their parents; their parents exist to honor them. [...] Ronan was mine but he never belonged to me. This is not an issue of ownership. A child is not a couch.

You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever.

Why are we so afraid of the body? Is it because it's a mess, unpredictable, mortal, unreliable? We take pains to perfect it, to keep it healthy, but we probably wouldn't go to such extremes if we weren't scared to death to lose it. A paradox: we pretend we don't need it, that it's our minds that matter, and yet the body is the thing we can't ignore and that knocks our thinking minds flat to the floor.

In other words, rendering loss was a way of honoring life.

There was nothing expected of or for him. In that love he was free.

And although I no longer identified with the stringency or dogma of organized Christian religion, I remained drawn to the compassion and sense of community that still existed in houses of worship.

And Ronan was making me think, yes, and he was making me think about thinking (Hegel would be pleased), but my task as his myth writer was still to understand my son as a person and a being who was independent of me and yet dependent on my actions, my attention, my love.

Sitting with Ronan on the couch I often thought 'How can I make this moment more precious? and then I'd realize with a sense of panic that no additional meaning needed to be sought or found. This was all there was. 'But still', I would think, 'What if I can't remember the way his hands feel, his hair. What if I forget how he smells? The sound of his laugh? The shape of his two front teeth?' Time was both too contracted and forever seeming.

Ronan lived in the world held by people who loved him and fed him and talked with him and met him on his own terms. When he died, he will have been fully loved from his first breath to his last and then after. That full uncompromising love, powerful and sometimes painful, was perhaps the only miracle worth believing in.

It is a unique and terrible privilege to witness the entire arc of a life, to see it through from its inception to its end. But it is also an opportunity to love without a net, without the future, without the past, but right now.

Who counts in this world and how much? Who does the deciding? Who has "potential" (that is, value) and who does not?

If we remembered everyday that we could lose someone at any moment, we would love them more fiercely and freely, and without fear- not because there is nothing to lose, but because everything can always be lost.