This is actually the hard part: people stopping me in the hall, being sympathetic, saying how awful it is that V. has died. I always have lots of trouble with this part – actual disasters don't faze me that much, but talking about them afterward in any but the simplest terms makes me a bit nuts.
It's sort of like something I've repeatedly mentioned at the AIDS presentations we make through the year – when you get through something, wherever you are with it emotionally, every time you bump into a new person and have to explain it to them, you have to go back all the way to the emotional beginning. With people who have AIDS, you have to deal with Oh, how awful for you.... And I tend to flee from all that, I'm afraid – today, after teaching and doing various administrative things, I sneaked out to have lunch (with a glass of wine) and then home.
You don't need to tell me that this is a kind of avoidance: I'm sure I must seem cold and quite ungracious – but I just can't revisit all the attendant emotions, let alone appear to generate them when I'm already past certain points. Acting shocked a week later than the truly shocking part is frankly kind of hard, and I get resentful that people seem to want me to do that – it feels a bit like professional mourners weeping and throwing themselves across caskets. I mean, if you're paid to do that it's fine, but....
It's easier when it's in an e-mail; I'm just not very good at the face-to-face evocation of emotional drama. Besides, I can't help feeling that V. herself would have been irritated by the same stuff – she also preferred a rather dry, almost clinical approach to disasters.
Another angle on all of this is the brilliant thing my friend Laura K. said to me once. Laura is very intelligent, forthright, efficient – a lot like V. in fact – but also the sharp one in a family of chaotic and self-indulgent people. When her youngest brother died in his late teens in an entirely pointless and dreadful swimming accident, she ended up managing the whole crew as they flung themselves about in throes of agonized grief; she was mostly pretty patient – but at one point she said to me, "It's already so awful in itself – why do they have to make it awful?"
My sentiments exactly.
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