The Loved Ones is a series of essays about those lost, the experience of being left behind still living, and the insatiable desire to find meaning in the wake of death. It’s about the instability of memory, and how the trauma of death reverberates through a family. Each of the first three essays explores the death a loved one in a collage of vignettes, zig-zagging through time and topic as a grieving mind tends to do. The final essay revisits each death while focusing on the body; the aftermath, the funerals, and the rituals we use to say goodbye to the body. The essays are presented with abundant breathing room on the page–giving space and weight to everything that is missing, everything that cannot be written. The Loved Ones is an elegy, a memoir, a burial, and a love letter to my dead.