Fresh grief makes practical directions feel like unbearable responsibility

Evidence

Passing by a bare, desolate-looking cemetery, I asked a sad-looking woman who was leaning on the gate if she could direct me to Golden City. I repeated the question twice before I got an answer, and then, though easily to be accounted for, it was wide of the mark. In most doleful tones she said, “Oh, go to the minister; I might tell you, may be, but it’s too great a responsibility; go to the ministers, they can tell you!” And she returned to her tears for some one whose spirit she was doubtless thinking of as in the Golden City of our hopes. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 205

Categorization

• FICTION: A mourner at a graveyard gate redirecting a stranger to ‘the ministers’ is a vivid, usable scene of grief refusing ordinary errands.
• STORYSTEM: A traveler lost at dusk who asks a grieving woman for directions and gets theology instead of geography — a story about maps that cannot be given by the grieving.