Making Everything Out of Nothing

Dear Rachel,

The other day I found myself laughing and joking with a friend. I still do this—tell jokes, smile, laugh—but I often wonder how I can laugh now, in the face of your absence. In fact, I may do a bit too much of it. Sometimes I think I’m a little manic, maybe trying too hard to convince friends and colleagues—and myself, perhaps—that I’m OK. “See? I’m alright, really. Things are fine. I can still be funny; I can still laugh and joke. I’m still the same man I was.” But of course I’m not. Not really.

In the middle of talking and joking with my friend, I was suddenly struck (once again) by the horror of your death, and by the enormity of our loss. It was a bright moment suddenly turned dark, as if a solar eclipse of the soul had arisen in the middle of a sunny day. It’s not that I had momentarily “forgotten” about your death; I never forget that, not for a moment. But I had insulated myself, temporarily, from the pain. I had shoved it into the background where, apparently, it lurked quietly, waiting to spring upon me.

One must do so, of course, if one is to function. Sometimes the pain has to be put aside, the bitter memories momentarily ignored. To discover that one were forever unable to push the pain into the background would be to set off on the road to madness.

So there’s still some smiling and joking and fun; but the laughter’s hollow now, and the pain is always waiting for me.

Paul Valéry, the French poet and critic, once noted, “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.” Perhaps it’s when one notices the nothingness that the pain returns.

Love,

Dad