I’ve never gotten over my discomfort at other people’s discomfort. When people say, What have you been up to, I hesitate. I will tell myself, Now, if this were a husband or father or sister who died, you wouldn’t simply omit the fact. If I say anything, people mostly change the subject anyway, and I can’t say that I blame them. I’ve done it myself, when meeting the grief-struck. It’s as though the sad news is Rumpelstiltskin in reverse. To mention it by name is to conjure it up, not the grief but the experience itself: the mother’s suicide, the brother’s overdose, the multiple miscarriages.
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