Things That Are Good: Tracing Entanglements of Hope

Abstract

Combining journal entries and reflections of past and present moments, this chapter conceptualizes grief and hope as working through, tracing entanglements of past and future. Specifically, this chapter begins with the memory of grief, a death, to think through other griefs: the ending of a relationship, the boxing up of a house and other movings on. Returning to lists of “things that are good,” I think with hope as working through large and small griefs in granular, minute ways that don’t always make sense and are not always linear. I think with these lists as an assertion of being-there, and being human, and how, through their repetition and refrain become a hopeful insistence. Hope as an affirmative orienting to future possible becomings. Hope as working through.