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.”

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