Read: 2025-12-21
Recommend: 8/10
The book begins with a burglary but mainly explores the author’s grief for Russel.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Most traumatic events present their size and shape fairly quickly. But some unfurl slowly, like a fist loosening its grip.
It’s impossible to predict how much you’ll miss something when it’s gone, to game grief in advance. We fend off the worry that we’re taking our lives for granted by feeding ourselves the lie that we understand the value of their components. This belief is necessary for our choices, for the ordering of priorities. But it’s flimsy. You can play the game of identifying what you’d save in a fire all you want, but you will only ever be mostly right. I have a decent read on how much Russell means to me, having spent more hours of my adult life with this man than any other, but it does not occur to me that I am this attached to the jewelry until I start cataloging it for the police report.
The burglary is a tornado, ripping up insecurities, exposing their roots. This is all my fault for not moving homes or cities, for not taking certain jobs or marrying certain men, for looking backward all the time when I should be looking forward. I dwell too much. I hold on to things I shouldn’t, to people I shouldn’t. If you don’t change, change will find you in its most unruly form. It will press down on your vulnerabilities until they squish out the edges. Life needs volunteers or else it will start calling on people at random. I promise to change. If only someone will take away the mental block that keeps me from solving this one mystery, from answering this one question, I promise to move forward.
A grief support group seems at once dramatic and doable. I won’t be so proprietary about the burglary around other burglarized people. It will feel good to show deference the second anyone says “masked” or “gunpoint.” But when I look for a place to go, I can’t find one. There are spaces, some literal and some virtual, for those left behind by cancer, heart attacks, natural disasters, and acts of terrorism. There are conversations meant for widows and parents and children. But there are no bereavement groups for stuff. They don’t exist. I’m sorry your house blew up but it was only a house. Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell, and people like me now, we don’t know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won’t judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in this tangible way. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight.
I knew three things: I knew I was the only apartment hit. I knew I would never see that ring again. I knew that I must learn to be okay with never knowing why.
The author I admired, the one whose e-mail Russell forged, was Joan Didion. The day I learn he’s dead, a detail from The Year of Magical Thinking comes rushing back to me. Shortly after Didion’s husband dies, Julia Child dies. Didion expresses relief. She has a “sense that this was finally working out” because now Julia and John could have dinner together. At the time, I found it difficult to believe she actually thought that. “Had I been operating in my rational mind,” she writes, “I would not have been entertaining fantasies that would not have been out of place at an Irish wake.” But I now find myself in the throes of a similar fantasy. In this fantasy, Russell is the one who finds the jewelry. Because in this fantasy, there’s a lost-and-found section of heaven where the dead can sift through missing objects and take what they want. This way they have something to love and those things are loved again. This way they get old but never age.
The miracle of life is not that we have it, it’s that most of us wake up every day and agree to fight for it, to hold it in our arms even when it squirms to get away. It’s a miracle, a genuine miracle, that the reverse doesn’t happen more often. Or, to quote Russell’s favorite film, The Lion in Winter: “Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives.”
Along with the superstition comes the paranoia. Russell did not battle with a demonstrable disease, going in and out of treatment, just like I did not lose my rings one by one. Anyone can have her batteries taken out midmarch. I once interviewed Mariel Hemingway about a documentary she’d made about her family’s history with mental illness. She counted seven suicides off the top of her head, including her grandfather. She said that when her sister died, she was scared she would be next, not because she was suicidal but because she felt suicide was sentient, not just familial. It needed a host body. I didn’t compute this at the time. But now the idea of suicide as contagious, as a baton pass, comes naturally.
The one thought that comforts me during this time is a controversial one: I don’t believe Russell thought he’d lost his argument with life; I believe he thought he’d won it. He no longer saw a place for himself in the world and this was the same as a terminal illness. The illness of aging. The illness of aging as a gay man. The threat of irrelevance, the loss of power, the expansion of indignities, the condition of being alive.
Suicide is often referred to as a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse—delicate things made out of solid materials.
He reminded me of an Oscar Wilde quote one of my college classmates had tattooed on his forearm: “If I want to read something good, I’ll write it.”
Age 23: Blushing when a bartender compliments my dress in a way that makes me fold my coat over it the whole way home, like a human burrito.
For twelve days in March, I lay in bed and watched the sky brighten, the gentle but inevitable tap of a new day. This kind of insomnia was familiar to me. Those living with grief know the particular sleeplessness it engenders—so nonnegotiable, so immune to warm milk and narcotics. Typical insomnia has an apologetic feel, like it doesn’t want to be here any more than you do. Like it knows you have a big day tomorrow but it can’t help itself. Grief insomnia has a mouth on it: Time does not heal all wounds. Time does not heal any wounds. Who promised you that? Get your money back. Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss. Usually, this is a good thing. So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident. But every so often, there is no such thing as regular life. Every so often, life crowds out loss with more loss.
One of Russell’s favorite quotes was “I’d rather cry in the back of a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle,” which he insisted on misattributing to Elizabeth Taylor (it’s Patrizia Reggiani, ex-wife of Maurizio Gucci, who had her husband murdered)
I am in still in the early stages of grieving and I find it suspicious that you are not lurking around this planet somewhere. I have been making silent vows to find you: If you are in the trees, I will climb them. If you are in the bushes, I will trim them. If you are in the ocean, I will drain it. Every day is an opportunity to confirm where the necklace is not. So why not here? Why not some place where you thought no one would come looking for you?
It turns out that most things don’t end too many times, Russell. Most things don’t end at all. So much is still unsolved. I still want to know where everything I loved has gone and why. Perhaps if I knew more about God, I would know it’s blasphemous to want answers, and perhaps if I knew more about philosophy, I would know it’s foolish to suggest there are answers. Maybe one day, in a world that looks reasonably enough like this one, you’ll tell me. But for now, I must poke holes in all this curiosity so that I might breathe, so that I might get on with the second half of my life. If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must learn to be on the side of the living. I must learn to accept that we are not the same.