Rabbi Nat Ezray, who led Dave’s funeral, told me to “lean in to the suck”—to expect it to be awful. Not exactly what I meant when I said “lean in,” but for me it was good advice. Years earlier, I’d noticed that when I got sad or anxious, often the second derivative of those feelings made them doubly upsetting. When I felt down, I also felt down that I was down. When I felt anxious, I felt anxious that I was anxious. “Part of every misery,”18 C. S. Lewis wrote, is “misery’s shadow … the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.
