What is closed

You hear about the deaths later now, and mostly by reading them.

Nothing is asked of you here. There is no sorting to be done tonight, no list to make, and no part of this that works better for having been done properly.

A good deal is closed.

The ones who died. The years, which went in a particular order and are not coming round again. Wherever you were living when it was still all in front of you. Whatever it was you were good at, and being the one who was good at it. A body that did what it was told.

And the thing nobody will say out loud in a room with you in it: that most of it is over. They say you never know and plenty of life in you yet, and they are being kind, and it means you have had to hold that one by yourself for some years now.

Grief for any of it is not a failure to accept anything.

There is a notion going about that sadness over a thing that cannot change is a sort of error — that a sensible person processes it and arrives somewhere. Nothing here agrees with that. Being sad about a closed thing is simply what a person does who understands what has happened. Twenty years of it is not twenty years of getting it wrong.

And the guilt that came with it is not an error either.

Carrying it has been a way of taking what happened seriously, and of staying with somebody who is not here to be stayed with. Nothing on this page calls that a mistake, and nothing here is going to describe thirty years of it as a thing you got wrong.

But there is something grief does that is worth seeing, and it is not about you.

Grief goes looking for a cause. It will not sit still without one. And where there is no cause to be found — no decision, no moment, nobody to point at — it takes the nearest available person, and the nearest available person is you.

So she got ill, and what you have is that you did not make her go to the doctor in the February. The years went, and what you have is that you wasted them. Somebody died at four in the morning while you were asleep in a chair, and what you have is the chair.

So there are two kinds of weight in this, and they have weighed the same for decades.

One of them has a question in it. The other does not.

Grief is a response to what happened. There is nothing in it to be asked, which is why nothing ever comes of asking. The other kind has a real question inside it — something that could have gone otherwise — and a question can be put.

Nothing here is going to tell you which of yours is which. The book does not know, it was not there, and it has promised you twice already that it will not pretend otherwise.

But there is a question you can put to any one of them yourself, and it takes a few seconds.

What would I have had to have known at the time?

If the answer is something you could not have known — that the pain in her back was not her back, that it would be that night and not some other night, that the work would go when it did — then what you have been carrying on that one is grief, which went looking for a cause and took you because you were nearest.

And some of them will not come out that way. You did know. She said it and you heard her, or you were told and you went anyway, or you did the thing on purpose and knew what it was while you were doing it.

Those stay yours. Nothing here takes one of them off you.

What can come off, even there, is the part that happens nightly — the going at yourself over it in the dark, which repairs nothing, reaches nobody, and is not the same thing as responsibility. Putting that down settles nothing for anybody else, and it leaves what you did exactly where it was.

For most people it comes out some of each, and there are one or two where the honest answer is that you still cannot tell.

Some of what is on that page has a question in it and some of it has none.

They have weighed the same for a very long time.