The Nothing Man by Howard Catherine Ryan

Author:Howard, Catherine Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2020-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

– II –

AMONG THE SHADOWS

– 6 –

Aftermath

I’m obsessed with descriptions of grief. I collect them, literally. I copy them down into a notebook. My motto: no poem, personal essay or misery memoir left behind. ‘As if you have been dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body.’ That’s from Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life. ‘It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes.’ Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. ‘Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.’ The poet Edna St Vincent Millay, from Letters. ‘Grief is like wandering through a minefield … however carefully you tread, a sudden detonation can happen out of nowhere.’ Owen Jones, quoting his mother in the Guardian. ‘That five stages of grief thing is total bullshit because that was ACTUALLY a study into the reaction of people who are given terminal diagnoses, NOT people who’ve lost loved ones. Grief doesn’t follow any pattern. In reality it’s MESSY and CONFUSING.’ An anonymous commenter on a website happily named TellUsYourGrief.com.

I collect them and try them on, but so far not one of them has fit. Not completely. What does it feel like to lose both your parents and your younger sister to a violent crime when you were just twelve years old and the first person to come upon the bodies? Who has written about that? Who can give me the words? Because in all these years I’ve never quite been able to find them. If pushed, I’d say I’d felt numb. Empty. Alone and lost. I’d drag out all the usual suspects, the standard metaphors, which, I’ve noticed, are all weirdly meteorological: an earthquake, a fog, rolling waves. I could talk about how, when Nannie and I were hiding out in Spanish Point, my grief felt like the effort required to live your entire life with your back pressed against bulging closet doors because if you move from them and they open, everything will come spilling out.

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