The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy. --- Anticipatory grief is the mind going to the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you want to come into the present. […] Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

Reading poetry and Googling rates of decomposition, on my fourth cup of coffee, I prepared myself for the nasty task of exhumation. I didn’t want to disturb her remains, but if somebody had to dig her up, if anyone must pry her bones from the soil, it was going to be me. I wasn’t about to let the capitalist cucks of our property management company touch my fucking tortoise.