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Total eclipse of 1878, one of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. Breathe out to push the fog away from a brilliant pinpoint of light. Grief is a response to an irreversible loss… To generate grief rather than sadness, the thing lost must carry great emotional weight, and it must pull back the veil that covers a transcendent aspect of the world. After twenty years of working with the visionary father of fractals and another twenty years of teaching fractal geometry at Yale, Frame draws on a lifetime of loss and a lifetime of delicate attention to the details of aliveness we call beauty to interleave memoir and mathematics in an uncommon tapestry of thought, twining Borges and quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology and Islamic art, music and multiverse theory.īecause every sound theorem rests upon precise formulation, Frame offers a basic definition: How the fractal nature of grief is both the key to understanding it and the doorway to moving through it is what mathematician Michael Frame explores in his unusual book Geometry of Grief: Reflections on Mathematics, Loss, and Life ( public library). In this sense, grief if fractal, each new instance containing within itself a set of self-similar sub-griefs - miniatures of the same emotional structure, rendered smaller in salience by time and tenacity, those twin inevitabilities of aliveness. And yet the shrapnel pieces that surface are smaller and softer-edged than when they first entered through the open wound of raw bereavement, smoothed and contracted by the ongoingness of life. But every loss also reveals what it is made of, which is more loss: Each loss takes a piece of us - a piece soft and alive - and leaves in its place something cold and heavy each subsequent loss becomes the magnet that draws out those old leaden pieces, pulls them out from the reliquary of scar tissue where we have been keeping them in order to live, makes them rip through our being afresh. One corollary is that, both in the evolutionary sense and in the existential, every loss reveals what we are made of. Loss is the price of life - a price we never chose to pay any more than we chose to be born, and yet a price not merely worth paying but beyond questions of worth and why. “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives as she neared, but never quite reached, the triumph of having lived a century - a bittersweet triumph, for to live at all, however long or short, is an unbidden bargain to lose everything you hold precious: every love and every life, including your own.