Maya Stein

On April 4, 2017, my father, David Ethan Stein, died after a year-long tug-of-war with brain cancer. He was two months shy of his 70th birthday. I was with him for five of the six weeks leading up to his death, keeping watch first in his old stone house in a tiny village in Brittany, France, and then, in a series of rooms at a local hospital, navigating the final geography that marked his illness. There was no cure to his cancer—it would keep advancing, no matter the armada of treatments he might throw at it—so there was nothing to do but keep him company and bear witness to the movements of his disease and report what I saw to family and friends who could not be there.

And so I kept a daily diary of my time in France, posting many entries publicly on Facebook (along with photographs of the landscape around me), as well as separate letters to those closest to me and my father. It felt crucial to mark this moment with every bit of detail I could muster, to pay exquisite attention to every aspect of the experience. I don’t know, exactly, why I felt so compelled to do this, but perhaps it’s that I was struck by the unexpected beauty and grace of this passage. I wanted to have evidence of what I’d seen and heard and experienced. I didn’t want to simply have gone through it.

Now, nearly years later, I’m struck by is the way grief has been metabolizing over time. At first, the acute sense of loss—of my father’s sudden gone-ness—felt like a vacuum, a suction of energy that was both painful and irresistible . There was a part of me that wanted to get lost in it, to disappear into the depths of that force. As the months ticked on, I edged away from the raw and ragged pieces and began re-experiencing my father through his own words—letters and emails he’d sent me over the years—as well as the abundant catalog of memories we shared together.

Over time, the view has lengthened and deepened and softened. There are times, of course, when the ache returns, sharp and clutching, and there are times when I feel the most profound joy and amazement and gratitude—for who my father was, for who he continues to be, for the way his life has profoundly informed mine. For me, grief is a feral animal I have learned not to resist, and I hold my arm out, letting it take the lead when it needs to. Grief has become a part of me now, a weave in the fabric of who and how I am in the world.

Grief Becomes You is a tribute to loss, an offering made on behalf of a desire to give voice to the quieter, more shadowy, more elusive aspects of grief’s landscape. The work in this collection reflects the breadth and depth of that real estate, and my hope is that it provides the kind of navigation and comfort we often need most when we are lost in our grief: to know that we are not alone.