The Listening Room HQ

News emerged today, June 4, 2026, that those close to artist Marjane Satrapi have said she died of sadness a little over a year after the death of her husband, Mattias Ripa. Whether one takes that literally, medically, poetically, or all three at once, it stopped me in my tracks. I loved both Persepolis , the graphic novel, and the animated film. Like many people, I admired her ability to tell difficult truths without losing her humanity in the process. The phrase “died of sadness” will make some people uncomfortable. We prefer cleaner explanations. We like causes we can measure, classify, and place in neat boxes. Yet human beings have always known that profound loss can change the course of a life. Not only the body. The brain too. Anyone who has lived through deep grief knows that it is not simply an emotion. Memory changes. Concentration changes. Sleep changes. Time changes. The future itself can change shape. The world may remain intact, but the map by which we nav...

Sometimes loss doesn’t give you time to prepare. Last Monday, April 27, I suddenly lost a beloved decades long friend. There was no gradual decline. No long goodbye. Just a moment, and then the world was different. When someone you’ve known for years, decades even, is suddenly gone, the mind tries to catch up. It looks for continuity where there is none. It replays ordinary moments, trying to understand how something so stable could disappear overnight. Grief, in these moments, isn’t always loud. It can be quiet, disorienting, almost practical. It can be gathering at a wale and funerary ceremonies with friends you haven't seen in a very long time. We catch-up, we immediately start talking as if we hadn't seen in ages. But the loss, the grief, is there. For many men, and some women, there is an instinct to move past it quickly. To stay functional. To not linger too long in something that feels like it has no solution. It has no solution. Each of us will deal with it in...