Time Doesn’t Obey Our Commands. You Cannot

I Envy My Jewish Friends The Ritual Of Saying Kaddish - A Ritual That Seems Perfectly Conceived, With Its Built-in Support Group And Its Ceremonious Designation Of Time Each Day Devoted To Remembering The Lost Person.

Relationships Take Up Energy; Letting Go Of Them, Psychiatrists Theorize, Entails Mental Work. When You Lose Someone You Were Close To, You Have To Reassess Your Picture Of The World And Your Place In It. The More Your Identity Was Wrapped Up With The Deceased, The More Difficult The Loss.

There Are Many Kinds Of Loss Embedded In A Loss - The Loss Of The Person, And The Loss Of The Self You Got To Be With That Person. And The Seeming Loss Of The Past, Which Now Feels Forever Out Of Reach.

Much Of Hamlet Is About The Precise Kind Of Slippage The Mourner Experiences: The Difference Between Being And Seeming, The Uncertainty About How The Inner Translates Into The Outer, The Sense That One Is Expected To Perform Grief Palatably. (if You Don’t Seem Sad, People Worry; But If You Are Grief-stricken, People Flinch Away From Your Pain.)

I Am The Indoctrinated Child Of Two Lapsed Irish Catholics. Which Is To Say: I Am Not Religious.