What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.

I remember once hearing someone say that everybody, sometime in their youth— say around when they finished high school—should be given digitally altered images showing how they’ll probably look in ten, twenty, fifty years. That way, this person said, at least they could be prepared. Because most people are in denial about aging, just as they are about dying. Though they see it happening all around them, though the example of parents and grandparents might be right under their nose, they don’t take it in, they don’t really believe it will happen to them. It happens to others, it happens to everyone else, but it won’t happen to

Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.

I was reminded of another neighbor I once had, another elderly widow living alone, who used to knock on my door regularly to complain about the noise—baffling me, because I hadn’t been making any noise—until I realized that it was something else. A terrible thing was happening to her. Attention must be paid.

Never return to a place where you were really happy, and in fact that’s a mistake I’ve already made once in my life, and then all my beautiful memories of the first time were tainted.

Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.

don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

everyone says they believe they will see their loved ones again. Not for the first time, I note that no one ever seems to be afraid of going to Hell. Hell is other people, if you agree with Sartre. Evidently, to most, it’s for other people, never for yourself. And never for the ones you’re looking forward to seeing again.

The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.