What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.

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

The boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion: my ex was certainly not wrong about that.

Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle. Often attributed to Plato.

But the girl he fell in love with and married was now gone—and how was he to have known he’d be incapable of desiring the woman in her place?

I mean at times I was so absorbed in the material I forgot why I was studying it, and isn’t that the wonderful thing about reading, how it takes you out of yourself.

You know how it is when you live with something every day, I said. They probably don’t even notice it anymore.

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.

It’s hard for me to know what I should pay attention to anymore.

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.

It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.”

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.

Like the extinction of life on earth as a result of nuclear war or climate change, an afterlife that includes the possibility of never-ending fear and pain appears to be a horror too vast to be assimilable.

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?

And all it did was remind her how hard it was for people to accept reality, my friend said to me.

What do you think is the meaning of your life?

Let me not forget our last good laugh together.

This saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass. And I’ll be alone. Blessed are they that mourn.