Our Grievous Work

I haven’t cried, yet.

“The first thing you ever did was cry,” counters Heather Christle, early in The Crying Book.

In an interview about the unfolding emotional effects of COVID-19, “death and grieving expert” David Kessler suggests that grief is “not a map, but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world.” The scaffold he offers is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous five-stage theory of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. Kessler takes care to note that the stages are not linear, before advising that “acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies.”

I cannot imagine.

is a roving history, spanning a remarkable cast of grief experts showcased in wide-ranging vignettes. There is Yi-Fei Chen, who designs a gun that shoots frozen tears. Damini, an elephant held in captivity, starves to death after a younger elephant friend