What Are You Going Through

by Sigrid Nunez

Cyberterrorism. Bioterrorism. The inevitable next great flu pandemic, for which we were, just as inevitably, unprepared.

An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves.

The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.

Every place I looked was too crowded or too noisy or seemed, for some other reason, uninviting. A feeling of loneliness and disappointment came over me. It was a familiar feeling.

I have found that, after so many pages of so many twists and turns and other to-do, the ending is usually something of a letdown, and the bad guy being caught and ultimately brought to justice or destroyed is invariably the least exciting part of the plot.

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

Flaubert said, To think is to suffer.

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible. Alfred Hitchcock.

She often joked about her relationship with her daughter, partly because humor had always been a strong feature of her personality and partly because it was her way of dealing with difficulty.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard, begins one of the twentieth century’s most famous novels. Often this comes to mind when I hear people talk about their messy lives, especially about their unhappy families.

In the end, it was simply easier to let go, to do without each other.

The boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion:

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 them.

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

And this becomes your new life, your strange new life: an ordinary, undesirable person with a common, forgettable face.

Maybe I really am weird, like the girl said, or maybe I’m just a terrible, shallow person, but it often feels to me as though I had died, the once beautiful woman said. All those years ago I died, and I’ve been a ghost ever since. I’ve been mourning my lost self ever since, and nothing, not even my love for my children and grandchildren, can make up for it.

I had food and fresh water every day, and a dry bed, and at the time I’d never known anything better. I was born in a cage in a shelter, he said. I never knew how sweet, with the right human, life could be, especially when the human is a female of a certain age living without a mate.

It’s strange how wide the range of human responses to our kind is, the cat said.

The only thing that appeared to shock her more was my saying that I’d never been married and didn’t have any children. That this could have been a choice rather than some kind of curse she would not accept.

I figured she’d want to talk, as people so often do, especially lonesome people, who often talk volubly even to complete strangers about things that have nothing to do with the listener.

She didn’t like to remember being young, she said. It just made her feel old.

What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?

You know she’s your girlfriend when she holds the hair out of your face while you puke. We’ll drink to that.

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.

This is how it is with people, she tells me now. No matter what, they want you to keep fighting. This is how we’ve been taught to see cancer: a fight between patient and disease. Which is to say between good and evil.

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.

My way was to make a list then proceed to ignore it; instead of ever even looking at it again, I’d sit down and make a new one.

I’m sorry, he said. Is there anything I can do? Said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion.

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.

How do others deal with it. For years you share a life, the same house, the same bed, the same (or so you dare to believe) future plans. You spend so much time together, rarely make a move without consulting the other, reach a point where it’s hard to say where one of you ends and the other begins—

Was it that he had changed so much, or that I had buried him so deep, six feet under my heart.

Why don’t I feel more. Remembering very well, though, what I had felt. The love. The hate. The promise made: Never again. Never again will I allow my life to be spliced with another person’s life—

Within a week our relationship had grown to such a degree that it eclipsed the friendship of our youth. And it was this new intimacy that made secrets and lies intolerable.

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.

According to my high school English teacher, there are two kinds of novels. Half of them could be called Crime and Punishment and the other half could be called A Love Story. But when you think about it, a lot of novels could be both.

Golden hour, magic hour, l’heure bleue. Evenings when the beauty of the changing sky made us both go still and dreamy.

was life, that’s what. Life going on, in spite of everything. Messy life. Unfair life. Life that must be dealt with. That I must deal with. For if I didn’t do it, who would?

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?

They are young and they are beautiful—even in anger, they are beautiful, the way young people are.

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