“Unveiling Grief: Eiren Caffall Reveals the Hidden Wisdom in ‘The Mourner’s Bestiary'”
AE: Interesting.
EC: I’ve read a lot of spiritual memoirs, they’re fascinating. My father was interested in people of faith without being a person of faith, explicitly. He studied utopian movements and made Shaker furniture, and so I grew up in curiosity about what brings people together to understand something larger than themselves.
I admire people who do have a specific faith, because I think that discipline is admirable and beautiful, even if it isn’t my particular path. You can’t ignore the sacred. You can’t ignore the holy. You’ll fail to connect with most of the planet. Most of the planet has a wisdom tradition. If you believe that only science and rationality will save us, you’re losing a very powerful organizing tool. You also miss out on things like going to your local Union hall and sitting and having a bad cup of coffee with somebody who is trying to protect their job, even though they’ve been having to take a lot of time off, because their kid has a spinal issue and has to be in the hospital all the time. Right? You do the work of protecting each other in a way which is, on the surface of it, very small. But by seeing each other we see how we’re all deeply in charge of each other’s welfare.
