This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

People cannot bear to think there are channels of human experience that are closed off to them, that they’ll never know. People want to believe their experience is universal, that nothing’s outside their scope. That their simulation of losing their spouse is just the same as my real loss. I could see it when I caught them looking at me. Wondering how it would be for them. What they say: call me. What they mean: it’s your responsibility to let me know when I have to care.

They were so quick to define you, to pin you down to something. Who didn’t like music? What dead person didn’t have a great smile? A great laugh? No one was calling you these things when you were alive. Alive, you got to be just you. Dead, they needed to encapsulate you, harness you into a favorite movie they could buy, a favorite motto they could tattoo. No one got that you were those things primarily because you were you, not because they made you.

A silver lining to your death: I didn’t have to feel things anymore. Your friends’ feelings in that moment did not register on any level. That part of my life was over. The part that could care for another person, invest in them, it froze and then sheared off like a glacier, into the dead ocean of things I couldn’t access anymore. It felt like freedom, actually.

They say tragedies like this bring people together. They’re right. And it’s suffocating.

My wife, the only person I’d choose to sit in a car with in heavy traffic, was dead. And I didn’t want to synthesize it into something else. I just wanted to stay with the solid thing, your absence, which in its ethereal quality was more real than the other stuff.

You enjoyed people, and I knew spending my life with you would mean parties, get-togethers, couples dates, but that was all gone now. When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you. So there were two deaths.

Stunned by your death, unable to believe it, of course they’d construct some fantasy where you were alive and reassuring them, because even in death your obligation to other people wasn’t finished.

I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death.