Grief and Trauma and "AI"

I recently finished reading Geraldine Brooks's memoir Memorial Days, about the sudden death of her husband, author and journalist Tony Horwitz. It was fine, I thought; others have given the book much more praise, suggesting it belongs in the canon of "dead loved one" lit, the one over which Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking surely towers – for me, no doubt, as it was published shortly after my first husband died and I was struggling to make sense of the loss.

I read a lot of memoirs. I've said this before – it's one of my favorite genres. And I read many that deal with grief, although I don't always pick a book up because it does so. I thought H is for Hawk would be about raptors, I swear, not about bereavement. I've read plenty of self-help books on grief too, no surprise – I mean, I have a lot of issues to work through. I've read the better known philosophical and spiritual treatises as well – C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, of course. But I prefer memoir. I find it strangely comforting to read people narrate their own stories of grief and loss.

Or perhaps, I find it easier to read about other people grief than face my own.

In the differences between reader and writer – differences in our living and our dying, in how we experience and explain suffering and loss – I find solace, something that's pretty hard to come by, I'd say, when you're grieving. I find it helpful to think about others' struggles as I contemplate my own. It's a cliché, I know, but there is no one way to grieve, just as there is no one way to think.

There is no one way to think, hell, often there is no way to think at all as one grieves. How does one, how can one ever even think about the loss of a loved one – parent, child, lover, friend – before or after it occurs? So I appreciate too the heavy work that other writers have undertaken to try to express the inexpressible, to try to understand the unfathomable.

Here's where I pause for the refrain, the reminder: artificial intelligence "knows" nothing. It "knows" nothing because it "experiences" nothing.

Debate all you want about "reasoning" and "reasoning models." The provocative and disruptive ways of thinking lie elsewhere – in imagination, in curiosity, in hope, in unraveling... in how we grapple with love and loss.