Mother's Day

You have to learn how to live with the dead. Your relationship has been remade by loss. In the new relationship, absence becomes an overwhelming presence. The dead become defined by the space they leave. The things you wish you had asked them, the things you are already forgetting, those become the tangible things, the everyday things, the ordinary interactions that make up your life. An amorphous sense deprivation appears as your new organizing principle, the through line of every story.

Everything is atomized while the composition of the relationship rearranges itself. You have to figure out how to be with one another, how to move in and out of the corners. In the meantime, things exist without a structure. Everything is now up for grabs, the future holds within it both uncertainty and possibility. There’s supposed to be solace in that. The universe offering its condolences.

The facts: (1) recombination is a phase transition, (2) phase transitions require free energy (You will be exhausted), (3) things can survive through radical change.