Être ici maintenant.

Success in this business brings a certain freedom that comes with responsibility to support each other, to lift others up when we can, to keep the door open for the next kid, the next lost boy who's looking for a place to belong. I'm indeed a lucky guy. Lucky to have found my people, lucky to have work that challenges me, lucky to still be doing it. And I don't take that for granted.

While we’re all at different stages of our lives and careers in this room, we all share something fundamental. We share the privilege of working in the world of ideas, of empathy, or imagination. Because of that privilege, I’ve come to know myself.”

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Slowly and bitterly married her love

Married her body

….in boredom and joy

Slowly I came to her

Slow and restfully came to her bed

Came to her table

in hunger and habit

….came to be fed

Slowly I married her

sanctioned by none

with nobody’s name

….amid general warnings

….amid general scorn

Came to her fragrance

….my nostrils wide

Came to her greed

….with seed for a child

Years in the coming

and years in retreat

….Slowly I married her

Slowly I kneeled

And now we are wounded

….so deep and so well

that no one can hurt us

except Death itself

….And all through Death’s dream

I move with her lips

The dream is a night

….but eternal the kiss

And slowly I come to her

…slowly we shed

the clothes of our doubting

….and slowly we wed

This is a very beautiful question and I am grateful that you have asked it. It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.

I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

With love, Nick.

at one and the same time,

like the shock of being born,

breathing in this world

while lamenting for the one we’ve left.

No one needs to tell us

we are already on our onward way,

no one has to remind us

of our everyday and intimate

embrace

with disappearance.

We were born saying goodbye

to what we love,

we were born

in a beautiful reluctance

to be here,

not quite ready

to breathe in this new world.

We are here and we are not,

we are present while still not

wanting to admit we have arrived.

Not quite arrived in our minds

yet always arriving in the body,

always growing older

while trying to grow younger,

always in the act

of catching up,

of saying hello

or saying goodbye

finding strangely,

in each new and imagined future

the still-lived memory

of our previous,

precious life.