"But there are some wounds that can never be healed"
About this Quote
A small, stubborn sentence pushes back against a culture of pep and closure. The hinge is the word "But": a refusal of the soothing maxim that time heals all, a turn toward the hard light of things that do not mend. Helen Garner has long distrusted consoling fictions. In her novels and in the courtrooms and sickrooms of her nonfiction, she sits beside pain without dressing it up, and she notices how certain losses resist repair.
Illness in The Spare Room is not a storyline on its way to redemption. It is a limit that makes friendship, patience, and anger flare into their true shapes. The deaths at the center of This House of Grief cannot be balanced by a verdict. Law can apportion blame, but it cannot replace children or unbreak a night. Even controversies like The First Stone leave rifts that argument cannot close. Across these scenes runs an ethic: do not pretend that words or willpower can stitch up every tear.
Calling a sorrow a wound suggests care as well as damage. Wounds can be cleaned, dressed, watched, carried. They can scar, sting in the weather, reshape how a person moves through the world. Garner writes toward that kind of endurance. She does not deny therapy, justice, apology, or time their modest powers, but she rejects the sentimental fantasy of being good as new. The acceptance is not bleakness. It is a groundwork for tenderness, for unheroic forms of courage, for the long work of accompaniment.
There is moral clarity in saying that some things do not heal. It frees the bereaved from the demand to get over it, and it calls on bystanders to stay. It asks readers to trade triumphal arcs for steadiness, to bear witness rather than fix. In Garner’s hands, the acknowledgment becomes a form of love: a promise to remain present in the presence of what cannot be undone.
Illness in The Spare Room is not a storyline on its way to redemption. It is a limit that makes friendship, patience, and anger flare into their true shapes. The deaths at the center of This House of Grief cannot be balanced by a verdict. Law can apportion blame, but it cannot replace children or unbreak a night. Even controversies like The First Stone leave rifts that argument cannot close. Across these scenes runs an ethic: do not pretend that words or willpower can stitch up every tear.
Calling a sorrow a wound suggests care as well as damage. Wounds can be cleaned, dressed, watched, carried. They can scar, sting in the weather, reshape how a person moves through the world. Garner writes toward that kind of endurance. She does not deny therapy, justice, apology, or time their modest powers, but she rejects the sentimental fantasy of being good as new. The acceptance is not bleakness. It is a groundwork for tenderness, for unheroic forms of courage, for the long work of accompaniment.
There is moral clarity in saying that some things do not heal. It frees the bereaved from the demand to get over it, and it calls on bystanders to stay. It asks readers to trade triumphal arcs for steadiness, to bear witness rather than fix. In Garner’s hands, the acknowledgment becomes a form of love: a promise to remain present in the presence of what cannot be undone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sadness |
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