Natalie Davis

About

Something I have witnessed many times: someone reaches for their phone to tell the person who died about something small, catches themselves, and then has to decide what to do with the next thirty seconds. They almost never mention it to anybody. Those thirty seconds are worth bringing here. Mourning happens mostly in gaps like that rather than in the large scheduled moments everybody prepares for, and because they are small they go unspoken and accumulate. We give them somewhere to go. It sounds slight and it is the part that most reliably helps. Research came first for me, and then the room, largely because the things I found interesting could not be measured from a distance. This is one of them. If your phone keeps betraying you, get in touch. Small moments accumulate faster than large ones, and they get spoken about far less.