nathan’s Reviews > Grief Is for People > Status Update

My grief for you will always remain unruly, even as I know it contains the logic of everyone who has ever felt it. Sometimes I close my eyes so that I can listen to it spread. So that I can make it spread. I run it up the walls of my apartment. I listen to it circle the doorframes and propel itself out the window.

How do I keep you buried and keep you with me at the same time?

💔

“There is only one liberty,” wrote Camus, “to come to terms with death. After which, everything is possible.” By now, I have come to terms. Rather, your suicide has brought the terms to me. Your suicide. As if it belongs to you.
…
But I still miss you like you wouldn’t believe. The years have done nothing to dull the missing.

We must decide the city is worth its trials…Where we are from and where we call home can, at long last, pull apart. Like repotting plants. We become not resigned to, but full of pride for the city’s endless parade of handicaps, for the ordeals that shape us.

Well death is so final.

You can ignore grief. You push it around your plate. But you can’t give it away.

An assembly of details. Is this what makes a person?

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” Also true: The whole world is empty, and a single person is missing for you.

Perhaps this is the plainest definition of anxiety: mourning what isn’t gone yet. Anxiety is an ever-present stage of grief, a shadow attached to the heels of its more infamous siblings.

Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss.