Some feelings about Max being gone

I oscillate between two feelings: unbearable pain and numbness (occasionally interspersed with moments of hysterical laughter). There is a need to numb the pain because it gets too much to bear. But then when you’re numb you feel like you’re not in touch with his death, like it’s not real, or like Max is not real, and then you get terrified that you’re accepting the fact that Max is dead, that Max being dead is going to become normal, and Max being alive is a thing of the past. And then you think of him being alive, when you were with him, saw him, heard him, touched him. And then you can’t believe that HE is actually DEAD. Then you cry and cry and scream at him through the walls and beat your fists into the furniture and ask the ceiling ‘Why?’ But you never get an answer. And you can’t believe you won’t see or hear from him ever again. That no-one will. And for the rest of all our lives Max will always be dead. Then life looks really long and hard and bleak and you long for the ache to go away for a while.

So you get up, you go somewhere, you do something, you see someone, something makes you smile. And the pain is numbed. And the numbness feels ok for a while. And pretty soon the periods of numbness get longer and the periods of twisting agony get further apart. And soon you start to actually enjoy doing the other, not Max-related things, when you’re not thinking about Max for a while. When you’re not thinking about the fact that he’s actually dead. Or about his parents who’ve lost their son; or his sister who is now an only child; or the friends who knew him since they were tiny and expected always to know him; or the others who all thought of Max as one of their best friends because he had the time for them; or the girl he was seeing who really thought a lot of him and now thinks of him even more; or about yourself and what you’ve lost, what you shared together for so many years, how you helped to make each other, how you sometimes became confused because you couldn’t tell where you ended or where he began, how he cared so much about you and now there’s so much of you he’ll never know; or about how he was so young and vibrant and would love to be alive right now, just like he used to be; or about how his death is such a waste of life.

You don’t think about all these sad, sad things for a while. For a minute, an hour, a few hours, a day, a few days. Until the next time it hits you or washes over you. And then you think about all the sad things that come from Max dying. And even if it’s been a couple of days since you really, really thought about it, it still hurts just as much, but you’re glad that it hurts you so. Because if you hurt this much then you know that he was real, and that you loved him, and that you shared so much life together, and that he must have lived, before he died.

Rosy