Unveiling the Hidden Journey of Grief: Matthew Salesses’ Profound Exploration in ‘To Grieve is To Carry Another Time’
Ever notice how grief messes with time like a scratch on an old vinyl record — the same moment looping, skipping, bending in ways that leave you utterly disoriented? Matthew Salesses dives headfirst into this temporal chaos in To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time, a memoir that’s not just about loss, but about holding onto time itself as it shatters and reshapes around us. As someone who’s waded through the labyrinth of grief personally and professionally, I find Salesses’ approach electrifying — he doesn’t just narrate sorrow; he interrogates it, threading his experience as a Korean adoptee and widower with insights from philosophers, physicists, and poets. This book doesn’t serve a neat closure or pat answers. Instead, it invites us to carry our grief as a continuous, non-linear companion — a relationship that refuses to be boxed into ‘moving on.’ If you’ve ever felt your past and present tussling in a tug-of-war, or wondered if grief might be less about losing time and more about carrying it, this one’s for you.
Reviewed by Helene Kiser
Grief does strange things to our experience of time. Anyone who has lost someone knows the dichotomy: you live in the present with your loved one gone and simultaneously in the time before, when they were alive and next to you. Many grief memoirs describe this sensation.
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