Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.
As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults.
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?