I tried to explain this to Helen, and she stopped me. “Don’t you see,” she asked, “that there’s nothing else to do? That there’s nothing for people to say, no matter why it is that they’re not saying it? At the beginning, you had this terrible thing happen to you. Your mother died. It was straightforward and concrete and anyone could respond to it. It was outside of you. It was an event. But what you have now is something very different. You have this sorrow that is simply a part of you, that isn’t an event at all. There’s nothing to say about it; all people can do is to love you as you now are, with this pain that has become a part of you. They can’t keep responding to it as though it were a thing of its own. It’s like the way people love you while you grow older; they don’t keep telling you how sorry they are that you’re growing older, or keep saying that they really like you and how it must be awful for you that you’re becoming old. It’s just you. It’s just who you are. You’re someone else now than who you were before, and your friends are as fond of you as ever, or maybe fonder than ever. Stop complaining about it. What you’re getting is as much as anyone has any right to expect.”

• • •

I thought about that, and the months passed. I saw Helen often, but I could not quite bring myself to push our friendship back into that physical realm where it had dallied at the end of winter, and I thought that I had world enough and time to think of such matters later on. I was, of course, quite wrong. In the autumn, Helen found a new boyfriend, a sweet man who clearly adored her, and though she continued to offer me her friendship, I saw that I had in some very fundamental way missed my chance. The man she had found was less difficult than I, less demanding, more devoted to her; I look at him and I look at myself and I am reminded how very sensible Helen is. These days, I see her once every couple of weeks, and though we are always glad to see each other, she is not at the center of my life; I miss her terribly. I am forever struggling not to be angry at Helen and her boyfriend. I have found boyfriends and girlfriends of my own, but as I am not sensible like Helen, they have mostly appeared and disappeared like dots on a disk of snow. Sooner or later, perhaps, I will really fall in love with one of them, and that one will last. I suppose that someone will be the one who cares, and for whom I care; but this is scant comfort right now. Helen gave me so much time, more time than I could possibly have deserved, even under the circumstances. I know that. I am the one who wasted it.