This poem appears in our Fall 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Freud—who wasn’t wrong about everything—distinguished between two responses to loss: mourning and melancholia. Where the former describes a process in which the self relinquishes its attachment to a lost object so it can move on, the latter marks a response in which the subject, unable to release the lost object, instead incorporates it—and is therefore thrown into a state of ongoing unease.
