We live to learn, or at least to develop, or at least to experience. That’s my working theory, and it functions pretty well as a guiding principle, whether or not it turns out to be strictly true. The Task is what the hero thinks he’s trying to accomplish, even when the Ultimate Quest is a mystery. It gives him something to point himself at.

A year ago today, my father discovered my sister dead in her bed. Her death is the worst single event I have ever lived through. I am obscenely privileged, and I tend to have what I want and need. I needed her. It made no difference. So that is a thing I have learned: utter catastrophes can and will happen, and without a clear cause. No event is too unlikely or too terrible.

It’s probably not the worst thing that will happen in my life, and whatever the worst thing is, it’s probably beyond my current imagining. Nameless horror lurks much nearer than it used to.

And my experiences of my mother’s death and my sister’s were completely different. Apparently, one catastrophe can’t necessarily teach me how to weather the next, even if they’re nominally similar.

Also, there are worse things than forgetting.

At first I was sure nothing could be worse than forgetting Melissa in any degree. I was determined to keep her image before me every second of my life. I would be a one-person cult, or at least the cult leader. Our temple would be her heartbreaking, abandoned, picked-over home, or maybe a good brunch spot, or the Aldi Aisle of Shame. Our colors would be coral and fuschia. Our flag would be rainbow; our number, 42. Our anthem and opening hymn would be “Welcome to Paradise”; our recessional would be “Chelsea Dagger.” Our priestly garb would be the patterned sleeveless dress and flip-flops. We’d heap the altar with mountain laurel. I could go on. I did go on, clinging to every artifact and every symbol. I lost myself in every photo of her face and was astounded — I still am, honestly — at how that face is etched into my eyes. These last few years, objectively and literally, I looked at her face more than my own. It’s like a part of my own body. Her face is as familiar as my own two hands, even now.

And I was in Hell. There was an initial period when I reread light fiction series for days on end, just trying to keep breathing. But then I got down to the serious business of never forgetting a single thing, and I devoted myself to keeping her alive somehow, and I was in Hell. I did the math. By my initial estimates, no amount of grief was worth forgetting her. I would prove my love by making that trade. I would buy memory with pain. I tried to. But eventually, that calculus changed, because I had underestimated how much I was capable of suffering. I didn’t know anything could hurt like that and keep on hurting.

Of course, I still think of her during most hours of every day, as I did when she was alive. But I don’t demand anymore that every time I get to the end of that sad mental rosary, I start over from the beginning without a breath. It doesn’t matter the way I thought it would. No amount of trying will bring her back to me. She cannot be reconstructed from memory. And no amount of pious self-flagellation can keep the treadmill going indefinitely. Some things will be forgotten. A year ago, six months ago, that would have been anathema. I raged. But I don’t set my heels against it now, not like that. You can call that learning or just exhaustion.

I learned, very much to my surprise, that suffering connects people, and not just the people who are doing the suffering. In Inside Out, Joy realizes that help comes because of Sadness. I didn’t know I was looking for help, and I never would have believed that anything could help at all.

But I cried out anyhow. Mostly it was an instinct born of panic. Surely if I felt like this, the earth was collapsing. The world was ending. The tribe must be warned! Protect the children! Every time I got on Facebook, it felt sort of like screaming in the middle of the street, like an alarm.

I never used to write, “Sorry for your loss” after fifty people had written it before me. I just didn’t see how it could matter. It wasn’t original, and it wasn’t informative, and I was not an important player in someone else’s moment of crisis, so wasn’t it almost egotistical to insert myself? My being sorry, no matter how sorry I was, couldn’t make even a dent in other people’s pain. But then all these people wrote, over and over, about how sorry they were for my loss. And it was so moving, and so unexpectedly beautiful. And whether they said so or not, every single person who had known Melissa was sorry in a slightly different way, having lost some slightly different facet of her. And every person who hadn’t known her but knew me was wishing me well with some slightly different inflection, just by being another person. My best friend traveled to be with me. Friends I haven’t seen for years saw what I wrote and acknowledged my hurt and I’ve been wrong my whole life, because it matters so much. It’s not something I could explain to the person I was before all this. I think it’s something most people know, that kindness can matter like that. I didn’t know it, but I know it now.

Part of learning about other people’s kindness was learning this: my own suffering pries open my heart. I’m not thrilled to find that out. I consider the opening of my heart an important Task, maybe even the real Quest. But I really, really would prefer to do it on my own terms, maybe by taking up yoga and cuddling babies. But if I’m realistic, I have to say that historically, it’s suffering that’s done the trick. When I was at my lowest this past year, I just loved other people better and more, and I mean all people. My dad, my niece and nephew, but also grocery clerks and casual friends. I hugged more and talked less guardedly and worried less after the fact about what I had said wrong. I wasn’t exactly saintly or anything, but I did care more than usual about others’ suffering while worrying less about protecting myself from their mess. I wished for others’ happiness with more intensity and less jealousy. The implications for my spiritual development are deeply uncomfortable. I don’t want the universe to get any more ideas about helping me with this.

I learned that when someone disappears from the world, the blast radius can somehow be both vast and tiny. A personal tsunami, a cataclysm, can be barely a ripple in the probate court, the car dealership, the HR department, the lawn service. So many people’s lives were diminished — or practically demolished — the day Melissa died; somehow, though, it was business as usual for the water company, the coroner, OKCupid, and the U.S. Postal Service. The cognitive dissonance continues to rattle me.

For those of you interested in the Other Side side of things, I learned much to my disappointment that, again, my dead mother and my dead sister have little to do with each other as far as my experience. I continue to feel my mother around me, but as constantly as I think of Melissa (to whom I was arguably much closer), I seldom feel like she’s very near. Possibly she’s not too good at this after-death communication business: as an atheist, she never seriously entertained the idea before, not that I know of. More likely, I’m sad and she’s not and that’s creating interference. I did see my favorite medium (so? I’m a nut job and a rube. So what. Love me anyhow) who managed to communicate references to both the dryer (presumably the one I was running when I heard from her at her house last fall) and sloths, which were absolutely a thing with us. But the way it was presented was so tangled, I didn’t even get it until later. I’m on my own for the moment (though if you’re interested, I’ll write later about the Girl Scout Cookies, which was a nice trick).

I learned the name of a good lawyer.

I learned that saying, “I am sad” to another person often feels just a little less awful than saying it to nobody. And writing on Melissa’s Facebook wall feels less bad than wanting to but restraining myself.

I learned that my niece and nephew are more resilient than might have been expected, and that I truly do love them. They weren’t just accessories to my love for my sister. No matter what happens or how they’re raised or where they go, they are mine to love.

Oh, here’s a weird one. I learned that I am lovable. Not in some profound existential way, but in the silly quotidian ways I love and miss my sister. I miss her (more) when I come across Highland cows or Memoirs of a Geisha or Uno or Tajin or baby owls or Larry the Cucumber. And one day I will be dead, and no matter how much I wish they did not have to suffer, my loved ones will miss me. It can’t be helped. I’ve wormed my way into their lives and I can’t be painlessly extracted. They will think of me when they hear chickadees or cook scrambled eggs or smell Jour d’Hermès, or, hell, maybe read this blog. Maybe especially then.

This morning someone knocked on my bedroom door and I sang, “Whoooo iiiis iiiit?” the way Egghead and Shively do. And I held my breath, crazily hoping for some miracle that would make the answer, “Mailman Fred!” And then I’d say, “Mailman Fred! Mailman Fred!” and do the Egghead and Shively puppet dance and open the door, and then my life would be put back together.

CIA Superior : What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer : I don’t know, sir.
CIA Superior : I don’t fuckin’ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer : Yes, sir.
CIA Superior : I’m fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer : Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say.
CIA Superior : Jesus Fucking Christ.

Burn After Reading (2008)

Amen.