GOOD GRIEF

For novelist Jesmyn Ward, language leads the way out of personal tragedy.

- BY JAMILAH KING

A lot of your writing deals with loss, including the sudden passing of your partner in 2020 and the death of your brother 20 years earlier. How has your grief shifted over time? I knew from losing my brother that the first two years were basically lost. It’s just a haze. Waking up every day with the shock of someone’s absence as the first thing you encounter. After that, you move into the work of grief. For me, that’s learning how to carry the love you still feel for someone while navigating your life. It’s been six, going on seven years since my partner died, and I’m still in that phase. It’s the small things. Cooking is different, sleeping is different, laundry is different. You have to figure out how all of that will change and reconcile yourself to it. The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.

Your new essay collection, On Witness and Respair, contains an unusual word most of our readers would have never heard of—“respair,” meaning “fresh hope.” Where did you find that? On Twitter, actually, in a poem by a Black poet. I looked it up and realized it meant the opposite of despair. I couldn’t use it yet when I found it because I was still in the first hot press of grief. But I wrote it down. When I wrote the