a small glossary about the weight of loss

A problem has frames and solutions. A void has neither.

Sometimes, the only way to deal with a problem is to encapsulate it in words, as if creating your own personal dictionary. Pain gets the texture of type and can be felt by touch. Failures become a story of the past. Loss becomes something that can be explained. At least enough for me to say something, anything about it. No matter the accuracy. Words do not answer a loss. They only move the weight of the absence somewhere I can carry it.

Problem. Anything that can be said more than one way, where at least one of the ways leads somewhere. Losing a job is a problem, especially when it's not your fault. It can also be described as an ending, a sign, a delay, an opportunity, and some of those descriptions have doors in them. The mistake proper to a problem is to treat it as fate: to feel the blow and never ask what it allows.

Void. What is left when every way of saying it has been tried and none of them closes. There is no description of her death in which it becomes a door. It is not useful. It does not lead anywhere I could walk. The way I can mishandle the void is to treat it as a problem, to keep describing it in new words until something gives. Even then, it isn’t something that should be handled. No hands can bear a void. Nothing gives.

Gravity. Simone Weil thought that everything in us falls toward filling the way a stone falls. An empty place in a life is unbearable to the part of us that obeys this law, and so we fill it with consolation, with reasons, with the meaning that comes before the loss has finished arriving. We now have a whole language for this, the language of channeling pain, of turning it into something productive, as if one owed the world something to show for having suffered.

Attention. Not the patience that waits for an answer. It waits for nothing in particular, and this is what makes it so hard. When I held every possibility open in the month after the layoff, I held them in order to choose. That was a kind of patience with a purpose. Attention has none. The nearest I have come to it was in the first weeks after she died, when I tried not to resist, and by resist I meant searching for every possible reason why it happened so suddenly. I let the reasons go unasked.

Décréation. There is a part of us that wants to be the one who wrote what happened. A week after the layoff I considered going to my manager. I was the only technical writer in a place whose documentation was falling apart, and I could have made myself necessary. I sat with the wanting for a while. Then I let it pass, without knowing what would come after, and without telling myself that letting go would be repaid.

Acquaintance. Knowing that something is there without knowing what it will do. I do not trust acceptance, which sounds like a settlement, a void filed away and closed. I do not trust learning to live with it either, which sounds like a skill acquired, a problem finally solved. To be acquainted is only to live with the void's certainty of existence and, at the same time, its uncertainty of effects. It is something like a conversation in which the other side never answers, and yet is there each time I turn to speak.

Effect. Weil is silent on what sitting with a void does to a person. I am not convinced the answer is nothing. I have an inclination that it does something, not as an action performed on a person but as an effect that gathers, the way a riverbed is shaped by water that never meant to shape it. I do not know yet what it might be. My deferral will always say that I am still not sure.

Grace. What may come into a space that has been left open. I keep this short on purpose. Each time I try to lengthen it, I begin describing a payment for having waited.

Two faces. This is where the first definition stops holding. The layoff was a problem, and it had doors in it, but it also carried an unfairness that nothing redeems. Life is unfair; it simply happens, and that sentence opens nothing. Her death was a void, and it also came with arithmetic that would not wait for grief, debts and plans and the ordinary demands of the following month. So the distinction does not sort events into two piles. Every event turns two faces toward us. The error is letting one face stand as the meaning of everything. There is the error everyone warns against, solving what cannot be solved. And there is its quieter twin: mourning so completely that the bills, the plans, the people who still need us next month are left unattended, as if nothing could be done about anything because nothing can be done about the one thing.

From where. When the urge to act arrives all at once, there is a question to ask before any other. Not whether this is a problem or a void, but where the urge is coming from. Sometimes it comes from love. Sometimes it only comes from the wish not to stay where I am. I cannot always tell them apart, but I can usually tell that I have not yet asked.