A review by lesleynr
Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

4.0

Barthes recorded his experience of mourning on little slips of paper over the two years following his mother's death. He expressed so many things exactly as I've thought them -- the existential shock of her sudden nonexistence, the confusion over the present tense, the fear of the catastophe that has already happened and CANNOT happen again, the confusion of finality in the midst of your own numbing, ongoing-ness, the agony and guilt of symbolic rebirth, the sudden marking of before and after, and what once was is never more, and what once could be is never the same. But I envy his ability to feel. These jarring mind states have often kept me from feeling... though I won't say I haven't suffered. In this, too, I identify with his own clarification that mourning isn't even really a process -- it's the effects of a suffering, a continued, renewed experience of awakening over and over again to something completely incomprehensible. There it is. Again.