Chris Duffy

How it's not linear.

It comes in waves.

It's circular.

Sometimes it's incredibly intense and then it goes away almost entirely and then it comes back and how that personal grief.

can actually be in some ways a roadmap for societal and communal ways of thinking about progress and of thinking about dealing with problems, that it doesn't have to just be this straight, incredibly efficient line from we are A, which is bad, and we're going to B, which is good, that that's not how it works.

For people who haven't read the book From the Ashes, and please tell me if I'm wrong, it's both the story of you grieving your father who passed away and it is a story of COVID-19 and deindustrialization and racism and societal failures.

You're explicitly connecting the grief of losing a person you love with the grief of losing a community or a sense of self or career, right?

How and why did you choose to do that?

We're going to take another quick break and then we'll be back.

And we are back.

You say in the book that grief does not happen on the clock of capitalism, that that's not how it works.

You're talking about how grief does not work.

And you say that.

So just to read it, many languages have a middle voice, which is less concerned with agency in the middle.

The subject does not do or have something done to them.

Neither can they simply opt out from or reverse the action of which they are a part.

They undergo change while engaged in interactive processes from which they cannot simply withdraw.

They are not and cannot be exterior to the process.

And then you say, you are grieving, but grieving is also doing you.

That really hit me in the gut.