Deitch

This is not about the depth of grief in general, which pretty much everyone can relate to. It’s more about how confounding it is, how gone someone is after they die.

And maybe that’s not even it. Maybe it has more to do with the way the world just fills in the space that they used to hold, like water or sand or air. And it doesn’t matter how you try to memorialize them: a stone in the ground, a photograph in a frame, an obituary in the New York Times, a blog post—those things just occupy the space they themselves are in, but they don’t move through the world, making jokes and drinking wine, getting pissed off, doing good work, wagging their tail when you come in. Those things don’t know that you love them, and take that love on their travels throughout the world, which is so much of what makes living…good/worth it/something other than miserable. (I don’t know; take your pick or add your own.)

Every death brings up all the other deaths (blah, blah, blah). I stopped talking to my childhood bestfriend, Rhona, and years went by, and then she died without saying goodbye. I did not say, “I love you. I have always loved you. Don’t think I won’t miss you every day.” So far, in this life, that is my biggest regret. (Please don’t be fooled by the size and flatness of that word, “regret”: imagine one’s own private, self-directed torture chamber.)

I think this is why we practice recognizing that the ordinary is the sacred—because it gives right here, right now, this unbearable sadness, it’s glorious due.

…left on my ten free wifi minutes at Gate 11 at France’s Charles de Gaulle. So vite:

My novel will be about a woman who, after thirty years, travels back to Paris, where she had spent a very romantic and happy six weeks when she was twenty-two or so. Back then, she was young and naive and wide open, and now she is completely jaded.

What the hell happened to her?! Or, more important, what will happen next?

There’s my minutes. I miss you. I’ll resume when I settle.

Last night, while watching “Julius Caesar” in parking lot on Ludlow Street (don’t ask), I spyed a tall, spindly young blonde, being groped by a meathead in a baseball cap. She was in short shorts and a tank top, and her pin legs were stuck in those high-heeled sandal boots that are all the rage. She was about the twelve. Her escort was one of those thick frat boy types, in a shirt untucked and running shoes. I couldn’t see his face because his baseball cap was pulled so low over his brow.

He was standing behind her, pressed up against her, his arms around her chest, his hands glued to her ribs as close to her breasts as he could get them without risking legal problems. He was grinning. The girl looked incredibly unhappy.

But then I realized that there was another person there, about two feet away, but in their orbit: the sidekick. She was another young girl, half their height, with a body like a strawberry shortcake—that is, lots of layers of fat. (Sorry. Wrong speech.) She was trying not to look at them, and also clearly trying to figure out what to do about her very existence in that moment: Why, mom and dad, why did you drink those beers and smoke that joint seventeen years ago? It was the nineties—had you never heard of birth control?!

When the couple moved—that is, when he kind of swung the skinny blonde back and forth with his giant paws, or pulled her backwards, or pushed her forward, the sidekick moved. It was both fascinating and hard to watch.

Remember that? Or maybe you didn’t go through it—the awkward phase. I was close to my height now when I was twelve (that is, about 5′ 10″), and I remember once being at a party in the seventh grade, and all the kids were pairing off and disappearing into the night. I was one of the last left, sitting on a folding chair in someone’s back yard with my curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, and the shortest boy in the school walked up to me and asked if I’d like to “go for a walk.” I said no. Sigh.

What can I say? I guess this is our initiation into life: it prepares us for the worst ahead, and it gives us some perspective when things are pretty great.