Writing with the Shadows

“I work to earth my heart.”

With some reluctance I finished Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow. It is a work written in the wake of her son’s sudden death, an immense, lucid meditation on the loosening of time and the quiet work of learning the world again.

I return often to Maria Gabriela Llansol’s phrase: the shad, ws that will remain living among us. Where do our encounters with these shadows take place—the non-existent realities, the figures of stories whether invented or lived? What would our thinking become without them?

Riley’s book is not a memoir of suffering, though it emerges from deep grief. Its tone is exact and dispassionate. She reflects on how mourning is bound to the process of writing. For three years after her son’s death she found writing almost impossible. “You can’t, it seems, take the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity.” Only once time resumed, well over two years later, could narration begin again.

Like Llansol, Riley does not treat the dead as lost but as figures who remain, and can be written with. To bring them into the text is not to recover them but to make space again for their presence, not in memory alone, but in language.