Embracing Life

Through a series of prompting questions, the speaker in “Vigil” invites the reader to embrace life again after loss. While the context for loss remains ambiguous in the poem, the experience of grief itself is universal. That being said, the bereaved do not necessarily follow a linear progression through stages of grief. The speaker in “Vigil” acknowledges this by saying that the grief of a year ends “Who knows where” (6). The speaker’s main response to this uncertainty is that we have nothing to lose by committing to a path forward, one in which grief is part of a new normal. This is conveyed by the repeated question “Why not…?”

“Vigil” was originally published in The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing edited by Kevin Young. Young chose to include “Vigil” in the section called “Recovery,” which highlights the role that asking open-ended...