Embracing Grief: Patti Smith's Journey

Patti Smith proves that closure is a total myth. She treats grief not as a crisis

to survive, but as a permanent texture of her life. In memoirs like Just Kids and M

Train, she isn't trying to get over Robert Mapplethorpe or her husband Fred;

she is actively co-existing with them. She calls it a fascination for melancholia.

She turns her home into a museum of life, keeping objects like old shirts

and stones because they act as physical anchors to the people she lost. Unlike Joan Didion,

who wrote about the panic of fresh grief, Patti shows us the long game.

She teaches us that you don't have to let go of the dead to keep living; you just have to