Widows Conversation
Conversations with Death
All this work became concerned with examining the ‘unintelligibility’ of the internal process of grieving the ‘bad death’. Trying to find a visual language for something that only yields itself in parts, that is messy and unforgiving.
One cannot hold a discourse on the “work of mourning” without taking part in it, without announcing or partaking in death … There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work. This is also why one should not be able to say anything about the work of mourning, anything about this subject, since it cannot become a theme, only another experience of mourning that comes to work over the one who intends to speak. … And that is why whoever thus works at the work of mourning learns the impossible – and that mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable. Right up until death.
One cannot hold a discourse on the “work of mourning” without taking part in it, without announcing or partaking in death … There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work. This is also why one should not be able to say anything about the work of mourning, anything about this subject, since it cannot become a theme, only another experience of mourning that comes to work over the one who intends to speak. … And that is why whoever thus works at the work of mourning learns the impossible – and that mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable. Right up until death.
