Everything is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss

by Stephanie Wittels Wach

The things I wish I’d known, the things I knew but didn’t say, the things I knew and said but should have said more.

I suppose it’s all part of the manic investigative phase, which is missing from the stages-of-grief flowchart. I keep trying to piece together a timeline, to crack the case, as if this will somehow soften the blow.

“Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

The permanence of death is unbearable. I can’t fix it. I can’t make it better. I am powerless—the

Even time moves differently now. It used to be measured in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months. Now, it’s measured before you died and after. It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time. It feels like I want to burn something to the ground and do nothing forever.

You’re in everything, but your everythingness no longer makes me hit the ground. Rather, it brings an unfamiliar sense of peace and comfort.

Maybe people are just shitty. Or maybe it’s the internet’s fault. Or maybe people are just shitty and it’s the internet’s fault.

‘Let’s stop finding a new witch of the week and burning them at the stake. We are all horrible and wonderful and figuring it out.’”

It starts all over again. Every day, wading around in the toxic waste of longing for a person who will never return.

I’m no longer the person I was before The Tragedy. I’m becoming someone else. I’m becoming a person I don’t yet know.

So long as we live, so he too shall live, For he is part of us, part of our memory, part of our love.

Siblings know you from the beginning. They know how you react to pain, setbacks, disappointment, hurt, and sadness. They know how to say the thing that will cut right through all the bullshit and diffuse the situation. Or, conversely, the thing that will exacerbate the situation, if that’s the goal.

It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at the same time.