Years ago, losing your health, being certain you are closer to the end has, in my opinion, no appeal. Perhaps the only one is learning, but I am one of those who think that life teaches you so many beautiful and fruitful things that this lesson, the fragility of your life and that of others, is not very rewarding.
Experience makes you understand two basic questions: no one is indispensable, and your disappearance — whether provisional or definitive — although it deeply saddens the people who love you, will not stop anything, will not substantially change anything. Life — I suppose thanks to God — is a force that pushes the living to move forward, and forgive the obvious.
Almost all of us have lived with desolation the moment of a loss that crushes and paralyzes you, and the consternation of realizing that the next day the world continues exactly as it was and that everyone maintains their rhythm without altering their pace. Everything goes on: the metro works (I'm not talking about trains, you know why), contracts are signed, the TV doesn't alter its programming, books are published, Zara stores are packed, children cry, students take exams, there are weddings and divorces, concerts and conferences and exhibitions are held, and diseases are diagnosed in all health centers.
Sometimes, when I see someone pass in front of me on the street with a sour face, I think: perhaps someone has died. But grief is kept within each person, and around sadness there is usually a conspiracy to pull that person out of the well and drag them towards life. We all carry some absence within us — time dulls them, but some are very hard to swallow — but we all also feel this kind of survival instinct that makes us think, as Oques Grasses say: "We are lucky to still be here".
Grief literature has dealt, and still deals, with finding the right words to explain all these feelings and make us feel a little less alone. In some cases, as in the magnificent The Nature of Things, by Yiyun Li, about the suicide of the author's two sons, writers point out the mistakes we can and usually make when we try to approach the pain of others. Yiyun Li crudely describes this kind of obsession with pushing those experiencing grief towards the bright side. She writes with great lucidity that, when she and her husband were living through their greatest tragedy, some people around them demanded that they say: "We are no longer devastated by the death of our son, we are back to being like you, normal people, so now we can continue living as if nothing had happened and you don't have to feel uncomfortable in our presence".
Being able to continue living as if nothing had happened; this is what we would want and this is what will not happen. When we lose someone we love, the world keeps going and we all end up joining this great charade "as if nothing had happened". But the truth, however uncomfortable, is there, very much alive, perhaps more alive than we are.
