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After Math
The mental calculations helping me make sense of my grief
I think I knew she was dead before I knew she was dead. But the human mind is a stretchy and abstract thing when confronted with particular combinations of variables.
9:00 Saturday night, early January: My friend’s husband calls. She is “missing.” She has been missing for about 21 hours. We begin the math: They won’t look for her until it’s been 24 hours. He’ll wait three more hours to call. Could I try to contact her?
I text her and then stare at my phone, waiting for the message to flip from “delivered” to “read,” because she always uses read receipts. It remains at “delivered.” Deliverance, it turns out, means nothing.
People get mad. People take off. People come back. She’d done it before. My boyfriend and I drive to the university where she and I teach to see if she’s in her office, to look for her car in the parking lot. Nothing. Still, things are probably fine. She had a job interview for an administrative position yesterday morning. She just got tenure. She has a promising book proposal under consideration — at Oxford, or as she and I called it, “fucking Oxford University Press!” We’d jumped up and down together like schoolgirls when she found out they were interested.
