Letting It Go Moldy | Passages from The Excursion

Sarah on grief, waste, and the hard mercy of turning pain toward someone else's hunger.

"You hiding in that swamp isn't noble. It's just hoarding. You're taking all that pain, all that experience, and you're letting it go moldy when you could be using it to feed someone else who's starving."

Sarah · Peter James Stouffer

He said the grief was his burden. Sarah called it waste. She called it leftovers.

She does not use a theological word. She speaks in the vocabulary of the kitchen and the counter, and she is more precise than anyone Elias has heard in years.

The force of the line is its refusal to flatter isolation. Pain kept sealed away does not become noble. It spoils. It could feed someone else.