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Oh, if life were made of moments, Even now and then a bad one—! But if life were only moments, Then you’d never know you had one. —STEPHEN SONDHEIM, Into the Woods
The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float. Nothing is missing, nothing is hypothetical.
Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity. But it can’t be helped. I can’t be helped. I am holding these losses as an aunt might, as if they are familiar but not quite mine. As if they are books I will be allowed to return to some centralized sadness library.
The problem is that our capacity to handle something shocking in the short term can make things indistinguishable in the long term. You become numb when you swallow too much sadness at once.
As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: “The person who has not at some point accepted with ultimate resolve and even rejoiced in the absolute horror of life will never take possession of the unspeakable powers vested in our existence.”
Rudbeckia running rampant. What a pleasant series of sounds.
They ask his girlfriend if he was acting strangely before he slit his wrists. “I haven’t met that many happy people in my life,” she responds. “How do they act?”
The miracle of life is not that we have it, it’s that most of us wake up every day and agree to fight for it, to hold it in our arms even when it squirms to get away. It’s a miracle, a genuine miracle, that the reverse doesn’t happen more often.
PTSD employs a math opposite to that of denial: Instead of your brain convincing itself nothing has happened, it convinces itself everything has and is still happening.
The reason the kangaroo and the emu appear on Australia’s coat of arms is because neither animal is capable of walking backward. The implication being that one must always look ahead, must progress into the future.
