Wit & Attitude Quote by Lynn Johnston

Grief is supposed to be an ending; Lynn Johnston flips it into a belated opening. The line starts with a defensive shrug - "I know it sounds crazy" - a small, telling pre-apology for admitting something that violates the cultural script. We like mourning to be tidy: closure, acceptance, moving on. Johnston, a cartoonist who made a career out of domestic realism, is pointing at a messier truth: death can remove the friction that kept a relationship shallow, volatile, or simply unspoken.

The subtext is less mystical than it first appears. After someone dies, the relationship stops accumulating new injuries. What remains is an archive: letters, stories, remembered gestures, the long-running panel of family history you finally have time to reread. You can interrogate it without the pressure of the next phone call or holiday blow-up. In that sense, "connection" becomes an act of editing - selecting moments, reframing motives, noticing patterns you were too busy (or too defended) to see while they were alive.

There is also a quiet indictment here of how many families ration intimacy until it's too late. Johnston hints at the ways everyday life crowds out the conversations that would have made connection possible in real time. Coming from a cartoonist, the confession carries extra bite: comics specialize in compressing years into a few frames. Her sentence does the same, distilling a painful irony into one clean, human beat - that sometimes the only way to meet our parents as people is after they can no longer perform the role.