“Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory – or in the memory – of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that’s all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried.”
Writer Antonella Gambotto-Burke was awoken at seven one Saturday morning by a telephone call. She could never have anticipated the subsequent devastation.
The Eclipse is a harrowing account of one woman’s experience of love and loss. Gambotto-Burke’s insights are startling; her ability to make sense of suicide, revolutionary. Does any man have the right to
dispose of his own life? This is, she writes, the ultimate debate of moral entitlement. She explains the premise of suicide and how it pivots on a fatal logical flaw. Arguing her case against our understanding of depression and bereavement, she poses a profound question:
If death is a process and not a state, how does that change the experience of grief?
dispose of his own life? This is, she writes, the ultimate debate of moral entitlement. She explains the premise of suicide and how it pivots on a fatal logical flaw. Arguing her case against our understanding of depression and bereavement, she poses a profound question:If death is a process and not a state, how does that change the experience of grief?
Gambotto-Burke’s life has been saturated by death. The first boy who proposed to her shot himself in the head at the age of sixteen. The man she was to marry, the notorious American editor of British GQ, overdosed and died convulsing in an ambulance at 38. And then her baby brother, gone. Grief is, she writes, something like coals to be walked on.
One of the most important memoirs about loss ever written, The Eclipse is a tribute to love itself. Because hope has its own biochemistry.
The Eclipse is available through Amazon. CLICK HERE
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