Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

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...