The Grief and the Gathering is a debut collection of essays about the places that form us and the losses that reveal what we have loved. Writing from Southwest Philadelphia—its rowhouses and shared walls, its schools, churches, and crowded streets—Brandon McNeice moves from a vanishing front porch to an eighth-grade classroom, from a Leonard Cohen song to a beloved dog's final morning, finding in ordinary life the largest questions we carry: how we come to belong, what we owe one another, and what remains when something we love begins to disappear.

Organized in five movements—Dwelling, Formation, Gathering, Witness, and Grief—these essays treat attention as a form of care, and one of the ways love continues after loss.