The ghoul in me

Nearly eight years ago I wrote a story about bereavement. It was a bit complicated stylistically, but I think it worked all right. You might want to read it now, if you're planning to ever do so, as I'm about to discuss it in detail.

It focused on what might be called a distant bereavement, and was inspired by hearing about two separate deaths: that of a brief co-worker, discovered some time after we worked together; and that of someone I knew in passing at school. These were far away in time and (social) space respectively, which gave me breathing space in which to insert a narrator. The resulting story wasn't so much about heavy intimations of mortality themselves, as about the lighter intellectualizing we employ to deal with being confronted by them.

One old man who had died many months before I found out; one young man I had barely known, but who had represented at the time the vicious swipe of that barbed statistical long tail across my still-youthful generation. Remote, unlikely occurrences, given weight by the subject matter. But they were still easier to write about, combined, than the weekend just gone.

Something awful has happened: a good friend had died a month previously, and I hardly even knew he was ill until Saturday (I'd heard he was get-well-soon sick, but not much more.) That I can't really write about him yet, or about the suddenness of knowing about his death, about missing his death like missing a train, is only seemly and to be expected. But what's agony is that the ghoul in me wants to write about it---pages and pages---when I can't; to simultaneously unburden myself and also act out a rather grim writerly performance. On the one hand I want to offer up my verbalizing in the crucible of the internet---where most of my life presents itself these days in one aspect or another---while on the other I seek nothing but quiet mourning.

This is the quandary of loss in our hyperconnected, uniquely literate age: that there are a million places we can write almost whatever we want; but nowhere, no cultural or technological space, in which we can howl like a wounded bear. This is the agony of modern grief.