Listen carefully at a funeral. The official business of mourning is the life that was lived, the stories, the photographs, the character. But underneath the eulogies runs a second current of loss, and it speaks in a different grammar. She never got to see her grandchildren grow up. He was two years from retiring; they had the maps out already. She’d just been accepted onto the course. The sharpest pain in the room is so often not for what happened, but for what now never will. We are mourning a person, yes, and we are also mourning their unlived life, the version of them that was still arriving.
…The funeral buries the life that happened. Nothing buries the one that didn’t.

A dying boy in The Long Walk reveals his wish: tea at his father’s house. A therapist explains why she turned the film off at that scene and what it says about the futures we invest everything in.

My mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 40 years ago. For many years, she took her medication, saw her psychiatrist, and managed in the ways that medication allows a person to manage. But she would point blank refuse to see a therapist.
Her reason, stated plainly and without apology, was this: “Therapy is for crazy people.”
She did not consider herself crazy. And we, her family, the people who loved her, lived inside the consequences of that refusal for a very long time.