What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

am so stunned that I almost jump to my feet. Not that I haven’t seen it before: a person tells a story from the past that they vividly recall when in fact the story is completely invented. And not that I think my friend is lying; on the contrary, I know that she has just spoken in all innocence. I know that what’s happened is this: her imagination has supplied her with a memory to help make a particular way of thinking about a traumatic situation more coherent. It’s perfectly likely that she and I once discussed the question of a person’s right to die. It’s more than likely that I’d taken the position that she said I had. Maybe I really was the chronically depressed and impulsive young woman that she recalled. But she and I had never worked together in this bar or anywhere else on any such course assignment. I have never taken Introduction to Ethics.

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. Othered. Who is more so than the dying?

Which is not to say that we regretted having watched it; no matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up.

I 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.

about climate change, it wouldn’t save one tree. Anyway, art—great art seems to me a thing of the past.” “That’s ridiculous. There are more professional artists working now than ever before.” “To be sure. But a certain kind of artistic genius doesn’t seem to occur anymore. We’re in the age of great tech, where genius abounds, but the last creative artist on a level with, say, Mozart or Shakespeare was George Balanchine, who was born in 1904. In any case, I certainly don’t believe in the salvific power of art as I once did. I mean, who could? Considering what we’ve come to.”

But it’s true, I do feel pretty hostile myself. All other issues aside, who could ever forgive those Americans—and I’m talking about all the privileged, well-educated ones—who elected a climate change denialist to the world’s most powerful office, or the oil CEOs who covered up their own research about the connection between fossil fuels and global warming way back when something might have been done about it. The enormity of that surpasses all the world’s episodes of genocide, in my view. I don’t know about you, but I’ve completely lost faith in people to do the right thing.”

Time. We were both keenly aware that it had become a different element from what it had been before we crossed the threshold of that house.

The worship of God once a week was completely abstract, but the love of learning—that was real.

You want to forgive all, my friend said, and you should forgive all. But you discover that some things you can’t forgive, not even when you know you’re dying. And then that becomes its own open wound, she said: the inability to forgive.

At such moments I felt that she was as much a comfort to me as I was meant to be to her. Every now and then she would squeeze my hand without saying anything—without needing to say anything—but it was as if she had squeezed my heart.

No matter how hard I tried, the language could never be good enough, the reality of what was happening could never be precisely expressed. Even before I began I knew that whatever I might manage to describe would turn out to be, at best, somewhere to the side of the thing,

He really did believe that’s how it was: each of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?