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posted December 2, 2007 2:55 AM PST

like a light from a dead star

"time heals all wounds" isn't exactly true.
i'm sorry, but it's not. grief is a bitch.

someone asked me recently if it was odd that they were still very upset about a close family friend who had died this spring. no, it's not. i've read that two years is about the length of the deepest period of mourning, but to be honest, it's not always enough.
last week, i had been working on a paper and listening to "carmen" and an album of great opera choruses. i decided that it was a little too rousing to listen to before bed, so i threw on a recording of maria callas doing puccini's greatest arias. i started it on "un bel di," and within two minutes was sobbing incoherently, filled with remorse and guilt and despair. why did i get to be here, listening to that, why did i get to go traipsing to operas? my mother introduced me to opera, and she's just cosmic dust now, while i go free and unpunished. (yes, unpunished.) it's monstrously unfair and hateful for me to think about, so i try not to, but sometimes i am reminded: she's dead. i will never see her again, or talk with her, or anything. ever.
and that's pretty much the worst thing i can imagine.

what tiffanie debartolo said is true:
"and no matter what anybody says about grief, and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken."

but . . . it doesn't happen every hour, or even every day anymore.

the more you think about it, the worse that loss is. and that's all that time can do: give you space.

so yes, my beloved: you will continue grieving for a long time. it will never leave you, the sadness. but you'll go longer and longer bits of time without thinking on it, or actively grieving. and that helps, though it will always hurt.

don't let it run you, the grief. i stayed with naes so long in part because he knew her, and i felt like that was losing a part of me, to lose someone who knew her, who shared her with me. but that was the wrong thing to do, and she would have hated it. and one day it'll stop making me sad that no one i meet from now on knew her. i hope.

sometimes i dream about her. i used to cry when i woke up, or be crying already when i woke, because i was so distraught that it wasn't real and that she wasn't still alive. but now i'm glad when it happens, because it's the closest i get to being with her again.

"That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles — overjoyed at the sight of the apparition — tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…."
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

last updated December 2, 2007 2:57 AM PST