Strange and monstrous treasure

I am reading Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing:

So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn't what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry. We don't know we're alive as long as we haven't encountered death: these are the banalities that have been erased. And it is an act of grace….

The first book I wrote rose from my father's tomb. I don't know why, perhapos it was the only thing I had to write then, in my poverty, my inexperience, the only asset: the only thing that made me live, that I had lived, that put me to the test, and that I felt because it completely defeated me. It was my strange and monstrous treasure.

It is the strange and monstrous treasure that binds us, Bonnie and me, as we make our way through these shared losses and gains, the urgency and necessity to make anew. The inverted fairy tale. Its attendant disappointments and shame.

"Not dying, living after the other, "remaining," is also an intolerable experience," and there is some of this, too. The death of one way of being in the world, so that another way can survive. A brutal simplicity it will take a lifetime to attempt to know.