Absence of Meaning... I've been having a rough time... And it's hard to explain. I'm getting out, and I enjoy the time I spend talking with and hanging out with friends, I may even act (and feel) like "same old Stephen" in some social situations... But when I'm alone, I realize that time has not healed my wounds... As time goes by, I feel the void and emptiness get deeper. I miss Chrys more and more each day. Each day, I think about what Chrys and I were doing exactly one year ago today...

Chrys's birthday falls on Father's day this year (June 18), and every Father's day ad on TV reminds me of this... All I can think about is how we would have celebrated his 35th birthday. This sucks!

I just finished reading Joan Didion's book "The Year of Magical Thinking." She wrote the book during the year after her husband died. It took me a long time to get through the book because it just hit too close to home... Near the end of the book, almost a year after her husband died, she described her grief. I couldn't possibly explain it more eloquently, so here's the (long) paragraph that sums up how I feel (emphasis added):

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate
(we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few
days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the
nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden
to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to
both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable,
crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe
that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of
grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will
prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days We imagine that the moment to
most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing
will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get
through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets
mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel
ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to
leave the scene, will I be able to even get dressed that day? We have no way of
knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the
funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are
wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of
meaningless itself.

  ¶ Monday, May 29, 2006