Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

I wonder how she could forget about it, a thing like that. And I wonder how she can go on living if she doesn’t.

“I think that I would try to be brave. Be myself and talk about the things that people might be afraid to talk about. Death is something we shy away from, except in literature or television, when we tend to stare right at it.”

I tell him about Mum and how his death has changed us forever. That’s the way it should be, I think. A death should change us forever. No two deaths should be the same.

I’m thinking of the transmigration of memory. Not the transmigration that happened in the Borges story, but the transmigration of memory that happens all the time—saving people the only way we can—holding the dead here with their stories, with their marks on the page, with their histories. It’s a very beautiful idea, and, I decide, entirely possible.

Dear Rachel, I hope you don’t mind that I’m writing to you. But I have been thinking about our conversations, and the great sadness that you must be feeling. I lost my wife twenty years ago, and sometimes I feel as if I have lived without her for a decade, and sometimes I feel as though I lost her just a minute before. I write “lost,” but I have grown to hate that expression. She was not a set of keys or a hat. The equivalent is saying that I have misplaced my lungs. I know you understand what I mean. I can see it in your face. There comes a time when the nongrievers go back to life, even some of the grievers, and you’re left trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. What’s the point in living on past the moment when those we have loved have left us? And how can we ever forgive ourselves for letting them go? I thought about these things a great deal after my wife died. I met her when I was twenty-one. She was my best friend. I could not imagine life without her. Without her in the world, time did not exist. A world without time is a terrible thing. There is no certainty. Days could move quickly or slowly, or not at all. The laws of the universe have been tinkered with, and you are blindly wheeling. There is no grip in a world like this. And a kind of madness takes over. But you know this already, Rachel. You know that you must hold on to any laws that you can find. I love my son, and he is the law that cannot be tinkered with. Love of the things that make you happy is ste...