Grief Is for People

by Sloane Crosley

Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity.

So, for now, in place of further description of Russell, I will ask only that you turn your attention to the time Martha Stewart Living offered to photograph his collection of mid-century earthenware water jugs. He refused. He feared he’d never know the joy of fleecing an unsuspecting vendor again.

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.”

What I am experiencing is post-traumatic stress disorder. 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.

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

There is, however, one constant I admire in other people’s accounts of New York, and that is the confidence with which they pinpoint change. There’s always that moment when life turned from solid to liquid: One day the subway required tokens, the next it didn’t. One day the towers were there, the next they weren’t. One day the lights went out and the floodwaters rose.

Thomas Merton wrote, “The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.” So I looked at my phone.

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. If you look closely, you’ll see it in the background of all the family photographs.

Was this not the imposed collective trial for which the MTA had been training us our entire lives? We are New York strong. We are New York tough. But who, I wonder, is weak? Pittsburgh?