Grief Is for People

by Sloane Crosley

Denial is humankind’s specialty, our handy aversion. We are so allergic to our own mortality; we’ll do anything to make it not so. Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity. But it 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.

But this is what comes of writing not “I miss this person,” but “Miss this person as I do.” It’s too much laundering of empathy.

He is my favorite person, the one who somehow sees me both as I want to be seen and as I actually am, the one whose belief in me over the years has been the most earned (he is not my parent), the most pure (he is not my boyfriend), and the most forgiving (he is my friend).

We had to make ourselves appealing before the dawn of social media, when there was no daily pastiche of the self and therefore less space for self-deprecation.

Russell was frank with those who reported to him because he expected them to be frank in return, to tell him when an author was unhappy, to edit the corny jokes out of his pitch letters, to chastise him for being late to a meeting.

So many of us will accept adoration even if it’s not about us, even if it’s only about the perception of us.

Functionality is not the problem. 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.

The reason it feels like no boundaries have been crossed is because the concept of boundaries has been obliterated.

What can be gleaned from this fact? To a person who does not expect trauma? Something cosmic. To a person who expects trauma? More or less nothing.

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.”

If you don’t change, change will find you in its most unruly form. It will press down on your vulnerabilities until they squish out the edges. Life needs volunteers or else it will start calling on people at random.

But there are no bereavement groups for stuff. They don’t exist. I’m sorry your house blew up but it was only a house. Grief is for people, not things.

It’s hard to know the size of things. To manage the size of things. Am I making our friendship bigger than it was to keep it from getting any smaller? Making the robbery smaller than it was to keep it from getting any bigger?

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.

George Sand said we cannot tear a single page from our lives but we can burn the whole book.

“How will he know you loved him,” she asks, “unless you try to destroy yourself?”

nothing seems to horrify people so much as the idea that you might rush the grieving process even as their tolerance for the topic dwindles—

Asking social media for help is like playing Russian roulette except there’s a bullet in most of the chambers.

You know that if you put your grief in a place that’s too prominent or too hidden, you will take it back when no one’s looking.

Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse—delicate things made out of solid materials.

This is the insensitive thought of someone whose only desire is for any story but the one she got. That doesn’t stop me from having it.

all stories have more than one entrance.

Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.

He would never put it in such sentimental terms, but he understood that real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.

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?

He taught me to be selective about who I jumped for and how high. This is a vital skill in a profession where accomplishment can start to look a lot like subservience.

it’s angering to craft a life in which you can tolerate participating, only to have it attract people who want to dismantle it, to be told that the same personality that built this place is now a liability.

He’d spent his whole life playing for Team Oversensitive and overnight he’d been traded to Team Callous. He knew from misogynists and megalomaniacs. He had no interest in taking credit for anyone else’s success. He used his spare time to fight for their raises. But none of that mattered anymore.

I suppose what Russell never understood is that if you are a recent college graduate living in the twenty-first century, the name of the game is not to play the game. The learning curve for the establishment has proven too steep and your peers have been sought out to translate the contemporary world, to turn on the Wi-Fi. They’re not gunning for a seat at the table. They’re gunning for the table.

John Updike wrote, “Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant.”

Outrage and indignation have an intellectual feel, but anger is guttural. Some element of the world did not hold up its end of the bargain and anger is the debt collector.

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.”

Anxiety is an ever-present stage of grief, a shadow attached to the heels of its more infamous siblings.

Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes I was just alone.

The anxiety may have been a blanket but the sadness was a knife.

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.