Grief is for People

by Sloane Crosley

And no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they’re still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby.

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.

Out of kindness or curiosity, they demand a tour of the story. But they aren’t having fun on the tour. They adopt the expressions of nurses, exchanging furtive glances about the drip.

I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking.

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.

A sudden loss is not inherently worse than an expected one, but it is more likely to feel like it can be undone. It’s the difference between forgetting your car keys at home and forgetting them on the driver’s seat, where you can still see them. You’re locked out either way.

It’s unpredictable, this stage of grief. Just when you think you have a handle on it, a crack opens up where the crazy gets in.

The pain is a weather system that builds and expands, occasionally touching down, like lightning.

trying to tourniquet his reflexive self-erasure,

You’ve been gone for a mere month and yet I already feel like I’m wallowing. This is a naïve thought process, a real misreading of the size of the map. I don’t yet realize that it unfolds.

It doesn’t matter how others have come to know about your suicide, doesn’t matter if I have told them myself, I can’t seem to find a moment alone with you. It’s the sensation of being in a crowd, angling to see a famous painting.

I find I cannot have an interaction with a new person, a person you would have adored, without wondering if I am meeting the friend you needed. Is this the person for whom you would have lived just a little longer? Is this the person who would have shown you how to keep going? What if I was the wrong friend for you?