Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Grimes

Grimes writes grief the way it actually sounds: disjointed, repetitive, half-stalled by the need to keep talking because silence would be worse. The line keeps circling around luck like it might offer logic - "who was lucky and who weren't" - then undercuts that comfort with the blunt physics of catastrophe: air pockets versus "bam". That tiny onomatopoeia is doing a lot of work. It refuses poetry, refuses meaning-making, and in doing so makes the horror feel more true. The point isn't the spectacle of a mine disaster; it's the collapse of the narrative we reach for after tragedy, the one where survival can be explained by grit, competence, providence, or any tidy moral arithmetic.

The subtext is an argument with fate. In earlier disasters, rescue stories let a community metabolize trauma: some were saved, lessons were learned, the future could be imagined. Here, "everybody was gone" erases the consolations that survival usually provides - the faces on the news, the hospital vigils, the ritual of hope. Grimes's phrasing slides from the specific ("workers") to the collective ("the state") because this isn't only about labor; it's about an identity wound. Mining towns run on risk that gets normalized until it doesn't. When the risk pays out in total, the depression he names isn't just sadness; it's a civic sag, a loss of faith in the bargain that work, however dangerous, remains tethered to return.