You need to get over this.

I hope you’ll get over this and start writing about other stuff again soon.

It’s terrible what happened, but you need to remember that there’s worse. You didn’t lose a child.

Some people get hate mail. I get hate mail, but I also get mail of a slightly different strain: well-intentioned mail that aims at constructive criticism but lands somewhere in the area of a belly punch.

You need to get over this.

There are worse things.

You didn’t lose a child.

I don’t know if the authors meant for their words to hurt, but hurt they did. I can no more make myself get over my grief than I can make myself stop loving my husband and my children, nor do I want to: my grief over my father’s death is part of me now, part of the emotional landscape that undergirds my whole lifeworld. But my critics – if I can call them that – didn’t mean that I should resolve my grief. They meant that I should stop writing about it. Because, it seems, the death of a parent, while painful, doesn’t warrant long-form narrative consideration. It might be sad, sure, but it’s not the death of a child.