Longing for Mourning

“Longing for Mourning” is a meditation on the verities of events that establish the ostensible stability of supposedly ordinary relationships—commitment, house-buying, and marriage. Influenced by the long history of meditations and commentarial literature on loss and aesthetics, this biographical essay is written as an aesthetic embodiment of theoretical positions. It ruminates on the forms through which time, death, loss, and repeated mourning transform such verities when they are the life story of an interracial, interclass, transcontinental and transnational relationship between two women.