Photography by Dan Sully
Loss is not an end, though I often wish it was. It is a sinkhole in the middle of a road. It is abrupt halt on a train bound onward. It is an interruption, then redirection. When you are the person left behind, life still continues despite what’s been taken. I have been thinking about this particular grief as I navigate how to move around it, knowing that I can, resentful that I must.
This past weekend, my grandmother passed away. Next week, it will be my missing friend’s birthday, marking it a full year since she’s been heard from. I ruminate on the etymology of loss, rooted in a sense of "dissolution”, but here I am, pushing an impossible, yet fully intact boulder up a steep hill. Like Sisyphus’ punishment, this is endless. They are gone, but this feeling—this giant weight on my back, in my heart, in my stomach—stays. A thought that I am returning to again and again is this: I will miss them, forever.
And forever is an awfully long time when you are the type of person who sometimes cannot even fathom a tomorrow.
I have not finished Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner (some things are too close to home and some, you realize, are already under your floorboards), but there is a passage that stuck with me.
“She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized.”
It feels trite to say that to be loved by someone is be part of them and vice versa. This was, to me, how it felt to be loved by my friend and in a more ancient and familial way, my grandmother. The usage of ‘archive’ refuses to leave my mind because when they’re gone, where do those parts of me go? What they knew about me, what they brought out in me, the care they gave me are now without their guardians. I did not just lose them; I am now less whole from my own sense of self.
Yet, some artifacts remain. An entire log of conversations, for example, I’ve had with my friend for years in a digital graveyard that I am afraid to frequent. In rare instances when I dare look, I catch glimpses of the intimacy now gone: inside jokes, confessions, and affection that cannot be reanimated by anyone else. I dread the days—some already passed, but all to come—when they slip out of my head entirely. I had already forgotten the specific details to which she knew me because it was not my duty to hold love for both of us. But she is not here, so I am holding to what I can, including this archive that included her.
Loving her now feels like speaking a dead language, when the only other person who understood it is no longer here to receive it.
I ricochet between numbness and endurance. I fill my days, but I am just a little bit less, spending mental energy on perseverance. I rarely know how to talk about her and I fear that if I allow myself to look at this loss fully, I will never look away. I have to grieve in bits and let the pain creep in through cracks. It’s the only way to keep myself intact, a job that I am clinging to half-heartedly most days.
Some time ago, I was talking with my therapist or perhaps a close friend about how falling apart is more work. Because I have to pick myself up eventually, I explained. Because then I’m tasked with making something of the ruin. But it's inevitable in some ways. I lose my ambition for work, I neglect my health, and I am not so concerned about losing momentum. I am trying, but I am trying less and probably worse still, caring less about the fact.
But this is also the responsibility of the person left behind; we still have to make semblance of a life somehow. We have to remain, as the historians of these archives, because we are the only one still here.
this was beautiful, sara.