I was beyond the point of self-torture. I no longer played the CDs that Talia loved, Morrissey and Sarah McLachlan and Tracy Chapman. I no longer obsessed over our wedding album. I no longer so much as set foot in Emily’s room, the nursery, which Talia had done out in pink and green with a Beatrix Potter theme, cute little bunnies prancing among soft pastel colors. Nor did I drink, at least not for the purpose of drowning my sorrows. Alcohol didn’t work for me that way; it heightened the pain, unleashed emotion. When you’re drowning, you already feel out of control. You don’t need intoxication to feel unstable. No, the only thing for me was frivolous diversion, the most innocuous sitcom or infomercial I could find on the tube, the easiest beach-read paperbacks I could buy. I couldn’t handle extremes, so I was reaching for the soft middle. In some ways, it’s better now, but in most ways it’s worse. The death of a loved one is unfathomable initially, this amazingly horrible thing that can’t have really happened, and then you’re immediately assigned to the rather mundane tasks of notifying people, arrangements with the cemetery, planning a funeral.
