Death is about loss: a statement so obvious it almost doesn’t bear uttering, let alone committing to paper. But until I experienced for myself a profound loss, I didn’t understand how pervasive this loss could be.
When I learned of Justin’s death, I knew immediately I had lost my husband. I soon realized I had also lost the life we had together, as well as the future life we had hoped to one day have. Our path together, which I had always envisioned as a bucolic road rolling towards a distant sunset, disappeared the instant he died.
But these are the obvious things; the things I could have predicted I would lose. There were other losses that I would never have imagined. My guilt over living on robbed me of the ability to do certain things I loved, especially things he had also loved. It is as though his inability to do these things and derive joy from them prevented me from doing them also, lest I experience a joy that he would never experience.
That is how I lost reading. I was always an avid reader, voraciously consuming everything from voluminous tomes to product labels. But after he died I was unable to read more than a few sentences. I would very quickly think “Jus would love this”, then immediately realize he couldn’t/wouldn’t and I would have to stop. And so it went for some time. Eventually I started reading again, but always books I knew he would scoff at, were he around to do so. These books were not what really I wanted to read, but at least I didn’t have to suffer the guilt of reading (much less enjoying!) something he would have wanted to read.
Until today. Today I read an essay on writing by Susan Sontag. It was delicious. It made me smile. It made me want to read and write and submerge myself in words. And not once while I was reading it did I think of Justin or feel guilty that he would never enjoy those words. I simply revelled in the joy of reading, made even more sweet by its long absence.
Death is about loss. But today I understood that it is also about what you (re)discover once you stop reeling from the pain of what is gone. I know it’s still early days for me, but today gave me hope that I might not have lost myself entirely or that if I did, I may one day be found.
J.R., I feared that my guilt and sadness would keep me from my beloved books forever. Melodramatic, I know, but it’s how I felt. But your contagious love of reading rekindled my own. So I will add this to the long list of things for which I am grateful to you. Thank you. Again.
