Sometimes it seems not a week has passed since an old friend of mine sat at my kitchen table recounting the loss he had sustained. Before I tell the story let me dwell briefly on "sustain". Could it mean keeping your loss in mind? Or keeping hold of what we have lost? Usually it characterizes the sustainer as an endurer, one who grits his or her teeth in the face of affliction and keeps going, someone compelled to submit to distress, woe-begone.
The word itself, from Latin sub + tenere, suggests what happens when loss is sustained: we hold it down. This is an attitude of unbearably private, inconsolable grief. The loss has nowhere else to go. Time stands still. In the years of Covid and Grenfell how sick one gets of public statements of the "hopes and prayers" type, with public figures "reaching out" to "share" a grief that touches their hearts like water on wax! For all their professed empathy, in the very next sentence they are "rolling out" and "ramping up" as if there were no tomorrow. But perhaps I should not be so cynical. For some, there is really is no tomorrow.
The loss sustained by my friend has remained in my mind. It is unforgettable. While bereavements accumulate as one gets older and may elide, his remains clear-cut, apparently resistant to the subtle workings of oblivion. However, this may have less to do with the story itself than with how he got up from the table after telling it and left my flat without saying "goodbye". At the time I felt irritated, shocked even. And for years I felt unaccountably tied to him and to what he had told me. I had listened as a friend should. So why did I feel burdened? Later I asked myself: why do we mark the beginning of an absence so clearly by "taking leave"? Is it to give that absence a comprehensible shape? A contracted and controllable shape? To create a before and after, in other words a past, helping us to maintain a sustainable distance? By not saying goodbye, my friend had somehow turned his loss into my own. Perhaps his burden grew lighter.
