—IT MUST BE DIFFICULT TO LET GO OF SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL

 

 

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING / Joan Didion

 

 

Clearly I am not the ideal teller of this story.

 

Grief is different. Grief has no distance.

 

I could not give away the rest of his shoes.

I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return. 

 

Dolphins have been observed refusing to eat after the death of a loved one.

 

I realized that the answer to the question made no difference. It had happened.

 

The way this is going is up. Because it has to go up.

 

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying.

He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.

 

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.

 

Time is the school in which we learn/Time is the fire in which we burn Delmore Schwartz 

 

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

 

Would I need to relive every mistake?

 

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

 

I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted him back.

 

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.

 

I love you more than even one more day.

 

I thought about the way we danced, close.