“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” -Didion March 30, 2007

There probably won’t be much ring browsing this weekend, but for good reason. 
 
M’s very best friend’s father died suddenly yesterday. Early 60’s, stroke. 
 
People will say, “At least he didn’t suffer.” 
 
His family will think, “We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.” 
 
Last night, I left the keys downstairs for M; he slipped into my bed at quarter to one. After a long day of work and television interviews, it was only in the wee small hours of the morning that he was able to grieve for his friend.  
 
I stroked his hair and, half-asleep, fumbled for the right words. There are no right words when someone is plucked from life so abruptly.  
 
When death touches your life but does not devastate it, it tends to make you introspective. You take it and internalize it and personalize it and suddenly it becomes “what if this happened to me? This could happen to me.” I noticed that M held me tighter than usual. 
 
I’m not sure if it helps or hurts that we’re going to see “The Year of Magical Thinking” tonight. Joan Didion’s book, and subsequent play, is all about grieving for a loved one. It’s about death and the suffocating tentacle of grief that it wraps around you, forcing you against your will to cope, to live. 
 
There’s a part in the book where Didion describes not wanting to get rid of her dead husband’s shoes because when he comes back, he’ll need them. She was in denial – denial she was aware of, but denial nonetheless. She thought that if she just did the right things, her husband would reappear and her life would resume its pleasant course.  
 
That passage really stuck with me. Mainly because that’s how I handle grief. Cold, hard denial sustains me for a while until the emotional dam breaks. 
 
I didn’t know M’s best friend’s father. But I do know what it’s like to lose someone. So this weekend, instead of ring shopping, I will stand beside my boyfriend as he stands beside his best friend. Grief is a lonely, isolated place to the point that it’s hard to believe that the world keeps turning while you feel like you are drowning and screaming and no one can hear you.  
 
You think: How can that woman walk home with those grocery bags when my loved one has died? How can that dog sniff that curb when my loved one has died? How can I continue to receive spam emails when my loved one has died? 
 
Every so often, when you get a moment’s reprieve from the suffocating pain, it’s nice to peek behind you and see people who love you and will continue to love you when the agony subsides. They help the agony subside a bit, a tiny bit. That’s why we’ll be in Massachusetts this weekend. We’re the people that will help with the agony, if even only an iota.