the firsts

Every ordinary thing you do after someone dies feels like a betrayal. I've been trying to understand why.

It lands like a gut punch every time you do something for the first time without them. And what comes with it feels like survivor’s guilt. The dissonance, the sense that your continued existence is somehow wrong when theirs has stopped. The first time that you’re still here doing laundry and they aren’t. The first time that you’re walking to the Opera and they aren’t. The first time that you’re watching your favorite shows, Matlock and Elsbeth, and they aren’t.

But I’ve been sitting with that comparison and I don’t think it’s right. Survivor’s guilt, the real kind, lives in circumstances where survival was a matter of chance or choice. You made it out. Someone else didn’t. The guilt has an event at the center of it, something that happened, something that could theoretically have gone differently.

This isn’t that. There was no event where I might have traded places with Dan. No moment where the outcome could have been mine instead. So where does the feeling come from?

These are just the ramblings of an ignorant layperson but I think the brain, under enough grief, goes looking for logic where there isn’t any. It can’t hold the raw fact of absence, so it converts the feeling into something that at least has a shape. A question: why am I here and they aren’t? That question sounds like guilt. It has the same weight, the same accusatory quality. But it isn’t asking you to account for your survival. It’s asking something it already knows has no answer.

It seems to me what the question is actually carrying, is just want. You want things to be different so badly that the wanting has to go somewhere. The mind turns it into a question because a question at least implies the possibility of an answer. It’s not guilt. It’s emotion that hasn’t figured out yet that there’s nowhere left to go.