LO_E

You fill it in: a V, or an S? it doesn’t really matter: they are the same. To love is to lose, sooner or later.
And the reverse? well, you wouldnt perceive separation as a loss if you hadnt loved the lost one.

Ive lost the only person who wouldve known, without explanation, what i mean by ”node of death”. It’s from a novel we read as teenagers, Kingsley Amis’ The Anti-Death League. You hear about a death of someone you only know by repute, then a death of someone you do know fairly well, important to you but not at the center of your life. Then, one of your intimates dies. (Or if youre really lucky, is only seriously menaced by mortality.) That is the center, the eye, of the node. Next, it recedes to someone at the remove of the second death, then finally again you hear of the death of someone you only know OF. And at that point, you’ve passed through the node of death and out the other side.

i think of it because I’m in one. i have reached the stage of the 4th death: on the heels of my bereavement, a young man i knew, not intimately but important to someone important to us, died in a car accident last night.

If i hear of a fifth, more remote death—can i hope Im passing out of the node?

It’s silly of course, a way of attempting to keep our great enemy at bay. And doomed to failure.