The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

If you learned new details about someone who was gone, then he wasn’t vanishing. He was getting bigger, realer.

“You get afraid of one thing, and suddenly you’re afraid of everything.”

There were some people who drew you in, leaned on you, and you spent more time with them in those last months than you ever had before. And there were people where if you were outside their closest circle, they shut you out. Not in an unkind way, it’s just they didn’t need you. You’d have been an interruption, you know?

“There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. Not that they had bad intentions, just . . . you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t.”

“You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”

Why mess him up? Yale couldn’t tell him anything the world wouldn’t eventually teach him on its own.

How lovely not to recognize anyone. How lovely not to know which of these men were dying.

But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”

was gone, and Nora was gone, and what had happened to the passion that had consumed them both? If Fiona could convince herself that it was floating around the world—just disembodied, leftover passion—wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing to believe?

Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?

The love of his life. Wasn’t there supposed to be a love of his life?

How utterly strange that Julian could have a second life, a whole entire life, when Fiona had been living for the past thirty years in a deafening echo. She’d been tending the graveyard alone, oblivious to the fact that the world had moved on, that one of the graves had been empty this whole time.

And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.

But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?

And she’d think maybe it was only possible to love someone that long if he was gone. Could you love a living, flawed human that many years?