In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my ever day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

Had I been operating from my rational mind I would not have been entertaining fantasies that would not have been out of place at an Irish wake. I would not for example have experienced, when I heard that Julia Child had died, so distinct a relief, so marked a sense that this was finally working out: John and Julia Child could have dinner together (this had been my immediate thought), she could cook, he could ask her about the OSS, they would amuse each other, like each other.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion of death in Western Attitudes toward Death.

I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day. “Don’t tell me your dream,” he would say when I woke in the morning, but in the end he would listen. When he died I stopped having dreams.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.

What would I give to be able to discuss this with John? What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that one small thing be?

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.