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The Conversation
Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne

‘Let go dad, I’m gone’: a father charts the anguish of losing a son too young

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Death comes at us, unswerving, immense, pressing on us its only gift, infinite absence. Mostly we face away from it. Too often we are faintly reminded of it when we deal with losses of one kind or another.

Elizabeth Bishop came at this connection in her own querulously open-hearted way when she began her famous poem of loss with, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

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