Terry Tempest Williams

What does pain prepare us for? Emily Dickinson says, “Pain prepares us for peace.”

Death is no longer what I imagined it to be. Death is earthy like birth, like sex, full of smells and sounds and bodily fluids.

I realize months afterward that my grief is much larger than I could ever have imagined. The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the flooded desert, become extensions of my family. Grief dares us to love once more.