In the beginning, people call and ask you out to lunch or over for dinner. They offer to help out and babysit for your child. They treat you like you are made of something very fragile that would break with a cross word or a misinterpreted action. And they are constantly bucking you up not because they believe that your sadness is unhealthy for you but because they are so acutely uncomfortable with what has happened. They have been awakened to the possibility that there but for the grace of God they may go to, and they don’t like it. They don’t like that you are not strong, that you need so much time, that you are frozen in a moment that you relive endlessly, and that you are quite probably infecting them with whatever bad karma has brought death to your door. The further out from the early days you travel the less they are there for you. Impatience replaces kindness and understanding. Why aren’t you taking steps to rebuild your life? Why aren’t you returning to the accepted standards of self-reliance? Why are you still sad? And lost? And needy? And taking up my time? Time that is better spent on things that aren’t tainted with grief and death. Past six months they think they are being kind when they offer you advice on what you can do for yourself as opposed to offering assistance with what you need done. They think that you would get over your loved one’s death faster if you would join a club or go to a singles’ function. They equate the lose of the person who loved you more unconditionally than your own parents ever have with breaking up with a lover or getting a divorce. You should be cried out by now. You should not be bothering me with this anymore. But, they don’t say that because they know that they are wrong to think and feel the way they do, and that you are in the right to mourn. They stuff that down deep; they way they wish you would stuff your grief. And eventually, you stop asking them for things because it is just easier. How are you? Fine. I’m okay. Even though I am not okay. The numb disinterest in everything is gone now and replaced by a raw, scraped feeling that makes you a lightening rod for every heightened emotion that filters past daily. In the beginning you turn inward and sought the cocooned safety that the emotional distancing of grief provides in much the same way burn victims are shielded from the agony of their smoldering flesh by a shutdown of the pain receptors. But the receptors switch back on in time to witness the desertion of family and friends who withstood the waves of heat rising off your blistering soul while you were oblivious to it. Because of this, you can’t easily label them traitors and cast them aside. They were there at one point. It was, unfortunately, a point at which you weren’t paying any attention at all. And now you really need the shoulders, the help reconnecting with society at large, and they are tired and ready for you to be normal again. And the ironic thing is that they know as well as you do that you will never be that kind of normal again. And the more ironic thing is that I am not sure I want to be.