Grief is for People

by Sloane Crosley

I am a tragic figure among my friends but in a fun way.

But what they do not understand is that if I do not capture what I have lost, it will be like losing it twice.

Luck is a dirty word when you’re out of it.

Most traumatic events present their size and shape fairly quickly. But some unfurl slowly, like a fist loosening its grip.

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).

It takes a special brand of brat to do what I did. I was twenty-five and proficient in nothing.

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

“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.”

Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell, and people like me now, we don’t know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won’t judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in this tangible way. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight.

Am I making our friendship bigger than it was to keep it from getting any smaller?

The question everyone should therefore ask is not why otherwise healthy people kill themselves but why they themselves should go on living. That sentence will surely read as morbid to those who have never identified as depressed and disconcerting to those who know me personally. But it’s no threat to anyone’s psychological soundness to think this way. We all have something we’re trying to fend off. The question is how big and with what?

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.

I wanted so badly to be like Russell, and maybe now I can be. He banked his pain in some secret place where no one could see it, and maybe I can do the same. Maybe I can put mine in a cabinet. But the drawers keep popping open. 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.

My initial grief, which I thought might be taking a manageable shape, has mutated. It’s colonized my entire personality. Any word that comes out of my mouth that is not Russell’s name is a lie. The missing is so constant, even I am surprised by it. And I am at ground zero of the missing.

The mourning has become such a constant, Russell’s suicide no longer registers as out of the ordinary. I have eliminated the contrast between light and dark, dismantled the whole frame of reference.

Loved ones suggest I take up a hobby. Silly gooses, I have a hobby. My hobby is drilling down to the core of Russell’s suicide. But the drill bits keep snapping off.

If you never shared a bed with the object of your grief, impostor syndrome sets in. For all this mandolining of loss, friendships are practically left out of the equation. This is the one type of relationship experienced by everyone on the planet, but when it comes to suicide? Friendship takes the backseat. Even when everyone was alive for it, my relationship with Russell did not exist in a tidy space. So why must it now? Why must friends be indirectly excluded from the conversation so that when inclusion comes, it feels like benevolence?

The guilt of this moment changes in diameter but never evaporates. To mourn the death of a friend is to feel as if you are walking around with a vase, knowing you have to set it down but nowhere is obvious. Others will assure you that there’s no right way to do this. Put it anywhere. But you know better. 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.

This was the house that Windex forgot.

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?

Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss. Usually, this is a good thing. So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident. But every so often, there is no such thing as regular life. Every so often, life crowds out loss with more loss.

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. But how else is one meant to handle an invisible threat?

It’s a strange thing, to have someone you love, someone with a lot of opinions, die before a global catastrophe.

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

In the photograph, you are forty-four. My age. It’s starting. I am catching up with you.

It’s the same with you. 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. This crowd consists of people you know but also of people you don’t know. I don’t know them either. But they’re out there. 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?

How do I keep you buried and keep you with me at the same time? This is the biggest riddle of them all.