Unveiling the Hidden Journey of Grief: Matthew Salesses’ Profound Exploration in ‘To Grieve is To Carry Another Time’
The book’s spine is its title’s claim—that to grieve is not to move on from a time but to carry it. Salesses reads physics the way the desperate read maps, looking for a route back. He describes moments while playing with his children after Cathreen’s death when he, forgetting she was dead, would instinctively begin to call out to her before his brain remembered. “My past no longer seemed to lead to my present. My life had been thrown out of time.”
I read this book as a widow. My husband died five months after his lung cancer diagnosis. I also read this book as a writer; as Salesses considers the liminal space of grief through time, my forthcoming memoir examines it through language. I know well that desperation for a route back. Five months is its own kind of time — long enough to grieve someone while he is still beside you, short enough that the diagnosis and the death feel like the same days. Salesses gave me a physics for what I’d only had a feeling for: the days are not behind me. They are the time I carry.
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