The Architecture of Falling Apart
I had not expected that grief would be so disorienting. The experts speak of 'stages'—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—as if loss was a metro line with clearly marked stops. They do not mention that you will Google 'how to feel normal again' at 3 AM, as if normalcy were a software update you could download.
The peculiar thing about wanting your old life back is that your old life wasn't, when you lived it, particularly remarkable. You complained about traffic. You worried about filing taxes. You got bored of being bored. You took for granted the luxury of being mildly annoyed by someone who would always answer when you called. Now you would pay any price for the privilege of mundane concerns. This is the cruelest irony: we long most acutely for what we once found tedious.
'Normalcy will return,' people say, meaning well. They do not understand that normalcy was not a place but a person, the knowledge that someone in the world thought your existence was their primary concern. Normalcy was 'never having to wonder if anyone would notice if you disappeared'. It was 'never being the only keeper of your own childhood memories.' Normalcy was never coming home to an empty house.
When a parent dies, you find yourself suspended in a peculiar unreality—one where the main character looks like you and speaks with your voice, moving through familiar rooms that now feel like memory boxes you're afraid to disturb, each surface holding the ghost of conversations that will never resume.
The person who taught you how to tie your shoes and haggle at the market, who could identify your voice in one syllable on the telephone, is simply gone. The mathematics of this feels impossible. How does a person who occupied so much space in the world suddenly occupy none?
I often think of the Portuguese word 'saudade'—that untranslatable longing for something that cannot return. The Portuguese, it seems, understood that some feelings require their own architecture. In English we make do with 'missing,' which suggests something temporarily misplaced, like keys. 'Saudade' acknowledges what we know but cannot say: some absences are permanent installations.
The grief counselors speak of 'healing,' as if loss were a broken bone that could be set right with enough time and proper care. They do not mention that you will develop an almost anthropological fascination with your former self—that person who worried about trivial things, who believed in the future tense, who made plans for next summer. You observe that entity from a great distance, this person you used to be, with something approaching envy.
The cruel efficiency of ordinary life continues. Bills arrive. Appointments must be kept. The trash still needs to be put out. The world insists on its small bureaucracies with the same indifference it showed to your happiness. You learn to perform the motions of living while privately marveling at the absurdity of it all—that the person who worried about your safety every day of your life is no longer here to witness your continued survival.
This, perhaps, is what they mean by resilience—the ability to act as if the world still makes sense when you know, with complete certainty, that it does not.
There is something almost cinematic about the way hope abandons you—not all at once, but gradually, like light leaving the sky. One day you notice you have stopped saving funny stories to tell them later. You have stopped expecting them to call to ask if you've eaten dinner, that relentless parental inquiry you once dodged with eye rolls and irritated sighs, not knowing you were rejecting the last person on earth who would lose sleep over whether you remembered to feed yourself.
One day you notice you have stopped making plans. You have stopped expecting the phone to ring with good news. You have accepted that this is the story now: before and after, then and now, the bright line that divides your life into what was and what remains. The child who remains, carrying the parent who does not.
You are now the sole custodian of a thousand shared memories, and the weight of being the only one who remembers is almost unbearable.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. But sometimes the only honest story is that the stories have ended, and we are still here, bewildered by our own persistence.
