The Birthday That Never Was
Dear Valerie,
Today is your birthday. Yesterday, I brought home your remains.
On the morning of Monday, January 31, 2022, not long after you were declared dead, I had to send a couple of text messages, and to have to write the words, “Valerie died this morning” was almost physically impossible — and it feels the same today. (On the way home after hearing your cancer diagnosis on December 29, 2021, you had said yourself that it “just doesn’t make sense”. It still doesn’t make sense to me, and quite possibly it never will.)
I have been doing my best to follow your oft-repeated advice to trust my own instincts. Even on the day that you died, I started to feel very strongly that I would be better off being alone as much as possible. I’m sure that flies in the face of what most people would think, but all I can say is that I know myself well enough to be sure that if even one other person was around me, I would inevitably be more concerned with taking care of them than myself. And if there is one time in my life when I believe it really needs to be all about me, it’s now. To say that I am grieving your loss is to hideously understate the reality that I am in by far the worst pain of my entire life. It’s indescribable. I’ve been searching for a metaphor, and am now convinced that an adequate one does not exist, but I might give some sense of what I’m…
