You?ve got to get up and make breakfast.
You?ll lie there for a while resisting, thinking all kinds of insensible things people think when they get up to make breakfast after somebody dies. Especially after a child dies. Like how you don?t deserve to eat. Like how your jerk body just carries on, dumb and deaf and pumping like the meat suit it is, taking stuff in and processing it and making energy and pushing it out. Why does one soft machine work when another doesn?t" It?ll make you stare at a bag of bagels, sighing, for longer than you should.
A few words about sighing. This is important.
If crying is the body-wracking shrieks of a three-year-old separated from a bookstore train set, I didn?t cry every day. If crying is a face dripping silently while staring into space for a minute or an hour, then maybe it was every day, and for quite some time. This is how the bereaved follow their love. All other ways are closed. And as soon as we ease away from the sighing and crying and staring into space?who knows when?we?ll mourn the mourning. In trauma, the concrete that separates regular life from golden tickets and glass elevators and giant peaches thins to a veil. Through it, we can see and hear and sense the other side. When you cling to it, you?re not wallowing. You are integrating.
Grief is not an illness, a diagnosis, or a constant state. Grief is the bruise after a blow. Blackening is normal. Swelling is normal. Then a rotten sort of putrid. Then it sinks beneath the...