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Fahrar crossword editor12/31/2023 ![]() Rather, it's one of those 5,000 piece jigsaws that are circular and solid white, impossible. Grief, in other words, is not a crossword. It doesn't matter if you use a pencil or a pen or a computer. The rituals by which we memorialize the dead can be peculiar, so much so that we may not even recognize them as rituals, for grief itself has no solution. When my family and I returned from the hospital, I found the crossword on which she must have been working. In 1985, my mother died, a sudden death, when we expected a slow one, for she had been fighting cancer for many years. I have enshrined an image of my mother sitting at our kitchen table in California, The Times open before her, calmly entering letters into the grid. She rarely had to erase anything and, on occasion, without looking at the down clues. For example, she could do the crossword in pen. Where the Times crossword was concerned, she was both an aficionado and an intellectual athlete. In my case, the answer to this question, like the answer to most questions, is my mother. ![]() The question I want to pose now, as much to myself as to other crossword junkies, is why. Even when I was in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy, I did the crossword. Even on Election Day, I did the crossword. ![]() Yet the need - one might even call it the compulsion - to get the crossword out of the way never abates. I can't say that this is always or even usually a pleasure, because it isn't. Every morning, after I have had some coffee, I do the New York Times crossword.
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