In the Slender Margin: The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying

by Eve Joseph

There is no road map for the dying or the bereaved. No linear path. There are stages that go back and forth. Moments of grace, moments of anguish. Grief is a mess.

In a recent email, Audrey asked me if my brother, dead, has had a profound influence on my life. No, I think to myself, it is not the fact of Ian dead that shaped me; rather it was his death. The sudden absence, the depth of silence, the inexplicable disappearance.

At its most intense, grief is a kind of madness.

After she died, I thought to myself: if only it could get silent enough, I might be able to hear her. If people stopped talking; if the wind died down; if the noise of traffic, the hum of wires, the sound of birds flying, cell phones, radios, the washer on spin cycle, someone clearing their throat—if only the sound of my own thoughts would die down, then maybe I would hear her and know where she had disappeared to.

I could picture her in her house. If she wasn’t there, where in the world could she be?

“Closure,” says a friend of mine, “is a crock.” We go on with the dead inside us. And sometimes, although it is impossible to explain, it seems they reach out to us.