But on the December visit, I brought a book — the kind of thing you bring when you’re settling in somewhere — and I read for two hours, and when I left I felt the specific quality of having spent time in a place where someone else was also spending time. Not grief, not memory, not projection. Something more neutral and more present than any of those.
I have been thinking about Daniel’s phrase: it was present in the way that presences are.
I know what he meant. I don’t know how he knew to say it.
I replied to the email. I know that sounds strange — replying to an automated send from a dead person’s account — but I wrote a reply and I sent it, because it seemed like the right response to something someone had taken care to write.
The reply bounced. The account had been deactivated, which made sense: the service would have sent its stored emails and closed the account on the schedule Daniel had set. He had built the thing to send and not receive. He had planned for the delivery and not for the conversation, which was like him — he would not have wanted me to feel the need to respond. He had said what he wanted to say and left it clean.
I saved the original email in three places. I have read it many times.
The fourth paragraph I have read more times than the others.
Not because it troubles me. Because it does the opposite of trouble me, and I am still getting used to that.
Daniel spent the last months of his life in the company of something he couldn’t name, in the corner of the room behind the sofa, by the window that looks north. He was not afraid. He described it, when he finally described it, as company.
He had not been alone.
That is the thing I go back to.
He had not been alone, and he had wanted me to know that, and he had found a practical way to tell me.
Even that — especially that — was completely like him.
I am still learning what to do with it.
I think I am meant to start by not managing it at a distance.
He would say so. He already did.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Leave a Reply