condolences

Today is Jack's birthday. He would have been 27. I took the day off from work to grieve and to spare myself interacting with anyone other than SRB and maybe a shopkeeper or two. One unusual part of the grief I feel in the aftermath of Jack's death is the need to be alone, to shut myself off from conversation. In normal times I don't mind being alone, but I draw energy from being with people. There is something deeply private about grief, though, and something tiring about people constantly sharing condolences. My grief is especially acute today, and my lack of tolerance for, well, anything.

This morning I talked to Mom, Dad, Linc and Linc's friend K for a little while. Other than Mom, they seemed drained. Linc spent four hours yesterday going through Jack's phone, a chore I can scarcely imagine doing. I'm grateful to him for doing it.

And I just finished, finally, going through the cards that Dad scanned and emailed to me, from friends and family. In the days after he died I wrote that there will be no new memories. I was wrong about that, other people's memories of him have poured into our lives. Some of them are in these cards. I took a few notes along the way, which I'll copy here:

• The first one to break me down was from Teresa Smith. So many of the cards say more or less the same things, but I didn't even have to read past her name to start crying. What a dear person she is. And holy cow what beautiful handwriting. 
• I have no recollection of the woman who says her first boyfriend was Jack. Her note was really sweet, I thought. 
• I'm grateful to Maryanne and Michael for writing a special note to Linc and me. 
• Brandon's card is beautiful and moving. "He could never make sense of life on this planet, in this form...and so he has taken another." True.
• I lost it a bit after reading Eyal's card.
• I really disagree with the Bill Coffin sermon, that we shouldn't say that sudden deaths are "the will of God." I'm not sure I believe in any kind of god at all, but if I do it's something like the god of Job, who wills everything into being and unbeing. The god of my understanding doesn't choose sides, doesn't consider some deaths natural and others against its will. If there is a god, it absolutely does go around with its fingers on triggers, its fists around knives, and its force in gravity and in every molecular bond holding together the concrete that ended Jack's life, the snow that caused Coffin's son to crash his car. Any other god is a lesser god, one too much like us, not worth venerating or even contemplating. To paraphrase Spinoza: If triangles could speak, they would say that God is eminently triangular. Bill Coffin is a triangle, and me too, and his god sounds an awful lot like a triangle, and I'm trying to embrace a god or something beyond my understanding that doesn't have our shape at all. 
• The mourner's kaddish is alright with me

The other reason I wanted to take the day off was to give myself time and space to confront Jack's death and my grief. I've written before about how easy it is for me to compartmentalize and put away things I don't want to think about. Mom said on a call the other day, in a different context, that one of my characteristics is a knack for being present. It's true that I have low anticipatory anxiety and that I let go quickly, for the most part, when plans don't turn out the way I thought they would. Those are things I like about myself. But a downside is that I don't readily allow myself to be present with my suffering. Jack died nearly two months ago. Today the sun is shining, birds are singing, I have lots of work to do, there are books to read and people to talk to and things to learn and trips to plan and a house to move out of and another to move into. 

But Jack is gone and I am deeply, deeply sad that I will never see him, hold him, laugh with him, play Scrabble with him, hear him rhyme, eat his cooking, be irritated with him or worried about him ever again. I must confront that pain, or else seal off a part of myself that I don't want sealed. 

A care package finally arrived today from a group of friends. They sent Cracklin' Oat Bran, peanut butter cups, confetti cake and frosting, a New Yorker and an Economist, and some books of poetry, and a sweet card. It must have been in the mail for weeks and I had to pay $55 in customs charges because Pakistan is a ridiculous country. I don't pay any income tax so actually I shouldn't complain too vociferously when they get me on things like that. Anyway I'm very excited about the COB. Must purchase some milk today.

Now it's lunchtime. SRB and I have some pad thai and some cabbage-carrot-beetroot-parsnip-onion salad to polish off, which is good. This afternoon I'll start packing and maybe make a trip over to the new place, to spread out the move. We'll hire a truck and a couple of guys on Saturday to do the furniture. 

Jack's dearest friend is going to be with the fam today in Silver Spring, which I'm glad about. I'll call tomorrow morning to be with everyone for a little while.