“How are you?” is still a question that you don’t know how to answer honestly. You at least can lie and say “ok.”

You hate that question. What is wrong with a simple “hello” greeting? No one every really wants to know how anyone is, anyway, when they ask that question. Just say “hello,” dammit.

You must say “ok. I’m doing ok. And how are you?” You must smile. You must go to those parties and not be the spectre. You must reassure that, no, no, the reason that you are not there, if you are not there, has nothing to do with anything except that you are busy or some other plausible, understandable, acceptable excuse. You must squint your eyes while you are too much in the sun. You must reassure everyone that all is well.

You must go to work, you must grade those papers, you must do the things that you cannot concentrate on, although you cannot concentrate for more than two minutes. You must tear your mind away from him, from his loss, from this most essential thing, and the thing that most comforts you within this essential thing.  You must control your anger. You must not direct your anger at other people. You must apologize if you do. You must reassure people that anything disturbing is only temporary. You must not disturb them. You must contain yourself. You must perform normalcy.

At some point in one day, listening to the news, you decide that you do not want to exist. You don’t want to die. You certainly don’t want your husband, your mother, your brothers, the people you love, to go through this thing that you are going through and that they are already going through. You just don’t want this particular existence. You don’t want this pretension of normalcy that you must enact.  You will never be normal, if normal means like before. You will be something else.

Your blog posts keep coming back to the same theme. You are stuck in the same place. You must suspend yourself between the blog posts to play the normalcy game. You cannot move forward. This infuriates you. This fury is part of the stuck-ness. It is frustration. The rawness of your earlier posts came from the ability to write them in the moment, from the ability to write the emotion, from the ability to write. Now, you feel as if the urgency stales in between. You fear that your mind swoops in to protect you from the emotion that you so desperately want to record.

In recording you keep the connection to him, and you don’t want to lose that presence, his spirit still about you. You want to make it something beautiful. You want to hold it in place with words, capture it in the way that Victorians did with death photos or mourning jewelry.

You almost hope you do something drastic, something ridiculous, something that forces someone to step in and say, “you need help,” “you need a break,” “you need” what you scream for in the subtext.

The last time that you waited for someone to do that, you ended up boarding a plane and missing the last two weeks of your father’s life. You ended up doing the thing that capped all of the regrets of your life. You will regret it for the rest of your life. The stakes are not so high this time. You must adult, although you do not want to pretend this normal existence.