Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

Where humans are concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure.

I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.

Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake