‘If grief is a spiral so is guilt’: Preti Taneja interrogates the language of terror and grief

When I think of that time, I think of a fingerprint, lines tracing around each other outwards from the small, intimate core. At heart the family, lovers, the friends and colleagues, spiral outwards, back inwards as you try to catch yourself in freefall

There is a hierarchy to grief. It is profound and right to observe it, especially when deaths happen publicly and violently, when such people as Jack and Saskia, who were just beginning their work and lived with the brightest hope, are killed. Especially then. The beloved young belong to the ones who hold them closest. First and foremost to the intimacy of deep feeling, scent of childhood, growing up, sun holiday. Sound of their footfall, their phrases, the taste of their jokes, trick senses of smell and sight.

Those who are left now must transmute their loss into objects suddenly so precious: necklaces, sunglasses, which yield to the way they laughed: light on water, a certain song. These dear fragments synecdoches of the left-behind. Then they become words, spoken, relayed, written down. A collage of a life. When they open their mourning to the world, it is by kind invitation.

But if grief is a spiral so is guilt. Now for...

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