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Strength and Sorrow

21 posts
  • Articles
  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

The Most Expensive Coffin: A Lesson In Value

  • July 30, 2025
  • OP
His father believed wood was for the living and coffin making invited misfortune. Yet after this, the coffinmaking only brought prosperity. New contracts with the funeral director funded assistants and a workshop. He became “the celebrity coffinmaker”. Ironically, trees had taught him death long before he started making coffins. He had watched trees die, split logs hollowed by decay and now he mastered balancing beauty with function. 
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

They just disappeared: A Lesson in Unresolved Loss

  • July 23, 2025
  • OP
As I started work on this grief series, I had to ask, what lesson, the cases of disappearance without a trace held for us. How was I to hold this discomfort that comes with frozen grief?
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

Make It Useful: A Lesson in Organ Donation

  • July 17, 2025
  • OP
My ancestors would say, The body is not yours to keep, it was only a loan, So take my eyes but see my humanity.  Take my heart but let it beat compassion into your bones. So tend this vessel, anoint it with struggle.
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

The Unseen Grief: A Lesson in Normalcy

  • July 10, 2025
  • OP
This generation, perhaps intuitively, is attempting to rewire their life script. They started on the fringe, morphing into a national collective of shared resolve who refuse to remain unheard and unseen. They cannot unsee what they have seen. In their agitation for agency, they tell us that what we see as normal, is not normal.
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

Grief’s Inheritance: A Lesson in Hindsight for Gen Z

  • July 2, 2025
  • OP
Millennials have their versions of lost innocence: 2007 and 2017, the seismic years of post-election violence. And now, watching you Gen Zs, I see that same flicker of dawning realization in your eyes, perhaps heightened during the June 2024 Anti-finance bill demonstrations.
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

Grief in the Digital Age: A Lesson in Change

  • June 25, 2025
  • OP
He was now just a number – a telephone line that could no longer be located. What do you do with the chat history? When someone close to you dies,…
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

The Order of the Good Death: A Lesson in Closure

  • June 18, 2025
  • OP
When someone says they want to "die well," they are usually imagining the size of the funeral.
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

Why did they Die: A Lesson in Bearing Witness

  • June 11, 2025
  • OP
The injustice of watching children grow into adulthood—lives dedicated to this mission—only for them to die. It's your life savings, lost to a single phone scam. It's the existential dread of a parent building a magnificent house, brick by brick, only to realize, upon completion, that those it was for no longer exist.
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

 Where Are Their Graves? A Lesson in Remembrance

  • June 4, 2025
  • OP
I know, I am part of a grave obsessed generation. The permanence of graves is our language of love, our attempt to control legacy and pushback against the ephemeral nature of life.
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  • Reflections On The Ones We Lost

When Sorrow Refuses Silence: A Lesson in Unruly Grief

  • May 28, 2025
  • OP
Allow people to grieve in the only way they know how. It is not a competition. Where it is genuine, it rehumanizes and demands a response. There is nothing irrational about unruly grief. It is a profoundly rational response to irrational, cruel death.
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Oyunga Pala
Writer. Coach

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