Getting to “After”

The Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

“There is something noble in the love of the dead.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have been thinking for the past few days now about Molly Osberg’s recent piece in Jezebel, “There Is No After.” In it, Osberg describes the incalculable toll of the past year, both in terms of human lives lost and in emotional and psychic trauma for those of us who remain: “Now, staring down the oft-invoked ‘return to normalcy,’…