How do you SURVIVE UNTHINKABLE TRAGEDY and still find BEAUTY in the WORLD?

ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2021, the poet, visual artist, and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths married the author Salman Rushdie. That same day, her best friend, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was set to speak at their wedding, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Within the first year of their marriage, Griffiths and Rushdie faced tragedy once again when Rushdie was nearly killed in a knife attack at a reading. In The Flower Bearers, out this January, Griffiths writes about what it takes to not only survive these compound tragedies but still feel alive and love and to still look at the world as a poet. We live in a time of incalculable losses. Most of us are trying to figure out how to live our lives while staying awake—how to reckon with what's gone without being overcome by sadness. Griffiths’s memoir, excerpted below, is a guide, in part, to living with and through grief and an ode to the everyday miracle of endurance.

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After midnight, I walk around the trauma unit. Pacing, dull-eyed, agitated, I try to anticipate what we will need to get home. I can’t call this “thinking about the future” because I truly no longer know what that even means.

I realize, and it hurts me deeply, that I am in the process of drafting a story where a woman and her husband, against their will, become new people in a new life.

I also force myself to accept that our marriage is in the process of being presented to the public. Being so obstinate about privacy, I try hard not to think about that. Thinking about it requires surplus energy. It isn’t my business to tell the world that I’m married to Salman Rushdie. I am aware that my Salman and Sir Salman Rushdie are the same man. Both live in our house.

I should be staying at a hotel, which is what my siblings do during those first days before they each return to their homes and jobs. Salman's sister and eldest son also stay in a hotel just a few miles away and travel back and forth via hospital shuttle. But a “few miles away” seems too far for me. Besides, when Salman wakes up fighting and shouting, it helps him to see me and to hear my voice telling him he isn't alone.

In a hotel, I know I won't be able to sleep or speak with doctors who could appear at any moment, very early or very late, during their rounds.

If I must take calls or need a conference room, I’m locked inside of it. For my own protection. The hospital, which is on lockdown because of Salman's hospitalization, requires that I have a guard accompany me anywhere, especially if I need to leave the trauma unit. If I want a cup of coffee or a sandwich, or if I want to sit in the Zen garden on the hospital roof, or if I need to walk outside to thaw from the frigid air-conditioning, I am not permitted to go alone.