The Denial That Wore a Suit
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In the weeks after the funeral I became, to my own surprise, magnificently efficient, and efficiency proved an excellent place to hide.
There were forms, and forms are merciful, for a form asks only for facts and never for feelings.
The office required originals, copies, and signatures, which I supplied with the calm of a man translating a dull manual.
Estate, deceased, the party of the first part: I moved through the vocabulary of death as though it were a foreign contract.
It is a curious relief, the , for it converts a catastrophe into a checklist that can, item by item, be completed.
I cancelled subscriptions, I closed accounts, I informed institutions, each in the flat, neutral register the institutions preferred.
We are sorry for your loss, the letters replied, and I filed their sorrow alphabetically with the utilities.
Somewhere beneath this administration, I now understand, a man was refusing, with great organisation, to believe what had happened.
Denial, I had assumed, was a loud thing, a wailing refusal, a hand held up against an oncoming truth.
Mine wore a suit; mine kept regular hours; mine paid the bills on time and never once raised its voice.
The most effective denials are not the ones, but the ones that look, from outside, exactly like coping.
To classify her belongings was to touch them without touching them, to handle a life while insulated in the gloves of task.
This is the shirt to donate, this is the ring to keep, this is the correspondence to be, at some point, addressed.
Each object, reduced to a category, lost for a moment its unbearable , its terrible specific weight.
The passive voice became my refuge: things were to be dealt with, arrangements had been made, matters would in due course be settled.
No one, in that grammar, was grieving; a process was simply, , being carried out to its administrative end.
I understand now why bureaucracies favour the passive, for it evaporates the agent, and with the agent, the ache of .
If no one is doing the sorting, then no one need feel what the sorting means, and the heart is briefly spared.
But the heart is not spared; it is only deferred, filed in a drawer marked later, quietly accruing an interest of its own.
One afternoon I reached the last box, the one without a label, and the system I had built had no category for it.
Inside were the small, useless, priceless things: a ticket stub, a pressed flower, a note that simply said back at six.
There is no form for a note that says back at six when the writer is never coming back at all.
The register broke; the suit, so to speak, came apart at the seams that had held me upright for weeks.
I had disavowed the loss so thoroughly, so competently, that its return arrived with the whole force of an ambush.
Efficiency, I saw, had not been strength; it had been the most avoidance I had ever engineered.
The procedures were real, but they had also been a wall, and behind every wall the thing walled out is waiting.
So I let the last box remain unsorted, uncategorised, and for the first time I sat with it and did nothing at all.
Perhaps grief, denied a door, will find a window, and tomorrow, I fear, it may come in as something like rage.