Tania Tagle: Grief is impossible in a system like the current one.

" Grief is like having a hole in your heart , you feel like you're going to die , but you don't die," his nine-year-old son tells Mexican writer Tania Tagle about his father's suicide. The author asks, "Where do you put those emotions in a system that forces you to be well ?"

"I think it has to do with the system we live in; it doesn't allow you to process the loss . The next day you have to make breakfast and work. There's no room in our contemporary society for mourning : it forces you to be okay, but you're not, because you're feeling so many things that you have to repress," the essayist, who usually inhabits the room of her experiences to create literature, tells EFE.

That guilt-free space in the face of the eruption of anger, nostalgia, and sadness surrounding grief exists in the pages of ' Faucet ,' Tagle's latest book born from her "need" to find a place to deposit her emotions related to grief and also to compile her son's memories, marked by the suicide of a poet who was both a father and partner.

Tagle names the hole in his son's heart with the word "fauce" - which in the plural, " fauces ", refers to the snout of beasts, from the palate to the neck - a " threshold that is neither the mouth nor the stomach, but is a place where you can remain" half-choked.

As he crossed this threshold , he recounts that he found many books that seek to sow guilt and morality about the emotions surrounding grief , such as anger.

Although she acknowledges that she found refuge in the texts of Piedad Bonnett , Chantal Maillard and Esther Salignson , three women who lost their children to suicide.

"Why did I identify as a mother and not as a partner?" Tagle, 39 , asks. She explains that the woman has a " caregiving relationship " with suicide, because, she recalls, "I felt more like a caregiver , and we were no longer a couple ."

For the cultural manager, this problem lies in the fact that the world is going through a " mental health crisis ," and it is women who have decided not to normalize it .

"Couples, mothers, sisters, and friends are taking care of men's mental health, yes. Not just mental health, but physical health too . In my family, men don't go to the doctor unless their wife or daughter takes them. And it's the same with therapy or any other care; that's falling on us," she points out.

Regarding this phenomenon in the literary field, he highlights that there are a large number of male authors who suffer from some mental health problem , but society has decided to " idealize " them and call them "geniuses" for their "talent or creativity."

Tagle admits that one never escapes the spiral of grief ; rather, it is time that stretches the corridors of that labyrinth , in which one gradually begins to walk with clarity.

• Like the day he confessed to his son that his father had committed suicide and that his death had not been an "accident."

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