Grief Is for People

by Sloane Crosley

And no one is obliged to learn something from loss.

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

I want to laugh, thinking of him saying this, but I can’t. Something is wrong.

The grief does not cotton to being squished. It takes the form of painful blooms in the chest that require attention, often in public. I stop in the street, putting my hand over my heart like I’ve just remembered something. Or else I sit on planes with tears streaming down my face.

I savor the dreams as much as I dread them. They are the only way I get to hear him say new things.

I spend hours this way, dreaming up new ways to think of him, smacking at macabre piñatas.

Anger is a cousin of intelligence. If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries. If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge. If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?

One is relieved for the dead, that they were spared the news, but frustrated to be robbed of their reaction.

Every day, new people are being reminded of how they are connected to you, of when they might have been in the same room, of where they might have seen your name. They are searching in their in-boxes, assessing their nearness to tragedy and moving on.

Those who think of me as healed are not looking carefully enough and those who thought of me as certifiable were not looking carefully enough. Though who wouldn’t be grateful to be thought of at all?

Perhaps if I knew more about God, I would know it’s blasphemous to want answers, and perhaps if I knew more about philosophy, I would know it’s foolish to suggest there are answers. Maybe one day, in a world that looks reasonably enough like this one, you’ll tell me. But for now, I must poke holes in all this curiosity so that I might breathe, so that I might get on with the second half of my life. If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must learn to be on the side of the living.

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. I can hear it clonking down the fire escape, cracking the concrete as it lands. Sometimes I hear it in the rivers, sloshing against the stone, or in the subway screeching to a halt. And then, because I cannot call you home, I call it home. I open my eyes and in a flash it comes back to me, zipping itself to my edges, bobbing between my fingers. It’s made a real life for itself here. Oblivious to its own power, it snores so sweetly on my chest, this outline of a woman whose time has not yet come.