Living On in the World Left Behind
Chapter 3 Endings and Beginnings
That someone’s words could sink in so deeply, I learned one day while I was in the very middle of my loss.
That day, I had been hesitating to go to the office. When I finally made myself go in, a senior colleague I had known for ten years said to me, almost in passing:
“I don’t understand how you feel, but — thank you for everything you did. You must be exhausted.”
That was all. There was no attempt to console me, no pretending to understand. And yet something in my heart quietly came undone.
Being told “I don’t understand” somehow felt comforting. Or rather, I think it was the first time I heard “the words I had really wanted to hear.”
At that moment, it finally made sense to me. “No one truly understands.” And that also means no one is to blame.
It is only natural that people who have never been bereaved can’t empathize with how I feel. Grief is tied to experience. There is a limit to what imagination can fill in.
These words, by “acknowledging that limit,” paradoxically affirmed my whole existence.
“You must be exhausted.” “I’ll always be here.” In each of those few words, the days I spent staying by her side, the time I spent moving through the chaos as if wearing myself away, even the lonely feelings no one understood, were all wrapped up, quietly and gently.
From that day, little by little, I became able to move toward “getting something back.”
My feelings never all got neatly put away. Even now, I sometimes suddenly remember her and sink. But I have come to think those feelings can “stay as they are.” I don’t have to explain them to someone in my head, or look for reasons. I have finally begun to allow that sorrow is simply there.
To borrow a term from psychology, this may have been a time of moving toward “restoration orientation.”
The “Dual Process Model” in grief research says that people recover little by little by moving back and forth between a “loss orientation,” facing the loss, and a “restoration orientation,” rebuilding their life.
After I met those words from my senior colleague and my friend that day, a process of “restoration” slowly began in me. It wasn’t about overcoming something. It was about simply starting to walk while still carrying what I had lost.
Looking back now, I think that single phrase was the power of “imagination” within words. The honesty of not “trying to understand” what one has not experienced, and saying “I don’t understand.” And then, on top of that, conveying, “I respect the road you have walked.”
Empathy doesn’t necessarily require “understanding.” If anything, “accepting what cannot be fully understood” may be what empathy truly means.
If it weren’t for those words, I might still be sunk inside myself.
Recovery begins like that, with someone’s gaze.
Chapter 4 Two Years
Back then, in the hospital room, she asked me gently, “Why are you crying?” But even I didn’t know, then, why I was crying.
It wasn’t only sorrow. After she was gone, the first thing I felt was — the collapse of my life.
The room, arranged on the assumption of living with someone, felt like a meaningless box the moment it became a space for me alone. I decided to move because I thought that changing the space would change how I felt. But even when my address changed, the coordinates of my heart didn’t move anywhere.
My life went back to zero, once.
Even deciding where to move was considerable pain.
I sent her things to her family home, packed my own things again, and began the work of bringing everyday life back.
So that I wouldn’t break down like this, I made up my mind to move to the company I had always liked best.
It was a new environment I stepped into while my mind was hazy and blurred. Days of working as part of a team. Tasks and roles that were given to me. All of it became a framework for my own “rebuilding.”
Even so, daily life let time flow, little by little. A span of two years.
It was long. But I had thought it would take longer. At first I expected it would probably take about three years.
So for me, two years was a “recovery” that came sooner than I had expected.
Of course, nothing is over. I haven’t forgotten her, and I still sometimes remember her out of nowhere and sink. — Like now, as I write this.
In a drama the two of us used to watch together, there was a scene where the main character dies and the soul departs. At the time I said, “Come on, that’s far too abrupt.”
Maybe the me of that time — didn’t want to accept a “parting” that could end so easily like that.
But the feeling that “I am myself” slowly came back. A feeling as if I were returning once more into a body that sorrow had occupied. A turning point where “being able to remember” begins to be a support rather than a sorrow.
In psychology, a stage like this is sometimes called “meaning reconstruction.” A process not of “erasing” sorrow, but of “carrying it as part of your own story.” It isn’t idealizing the past, nor forgetting it. It is the work of connecting “who I am now,” having lived through the loss, to the future.
The day I lost her, when my sobbing left me unable to see in front of me, I felt keenly, “I can never go back to how things were.” But these two years were not a time for “going back.” I can see now that they were a time for finding “how to live in a world without her.”
I am now in a present completely different from the future I saw back then. But these two years have finally brought me to “now.”
What came after the loss was not “an end.” It wasn’t “a beginning,” either. It was simply “a continuation.”
Moving into a new environment she never knew, with new people to meet, new discoveries, and new work — there were days when that felt bitter. There were also times I wore myself down, being disliked by someone, or looked at with contempt.
Even so, to spin that “continuation” myself. That, perhaps, was the last gift I received from her.
Chapter 5 In a Society That Cannot Speak of Death, Grief Is Left Behind
For a while after she died, talking about “death” frightened me terribly.
No, to be precise, “I didn’t know whether I was allowed to talk about it.”
When I said her name, the other person’s face would cloud over. The air would change. For a moment, the whole room would stiffen.
Afraid of that silence, I stopped talking about it too. I distanced myself from the communities I had been part of.
One day, something dawned on me. Society doesn’t let us talk about death.
As if to say, “That is not something to be talked about.” That was the attitude of today’s society toward “death.”
The French historian Philippe Ariès, writing about how “death” is treated in modern Western society, argued that whereas people in the Middle Ages accepted death as part of life, modern people treat death as taboo and have come to deal with it in places separated from daily life, such as hospitals.
Pushing death away into hospitals, not making it a topic of conversation, keeping death at a distance as “an exception outside ordinary life.” That also means that society as a whole is, without realizing it, denying “death.”
By not speaking of death, people have the illusion that they are protected from it. But for someone who has lost a person, that silence becomes “one more loss.”
Talking about her was not a rekindling of sorrow. If anything, it was a confirmation that “she was truly here,” and a practice through which I myself go on “remembering her.”
But that kind of conversation is rarely allowed.
In psychology, research on “the fear of death” has accumulated over the years. Among it, Terror Management Theory explains the psychological mechanism by which people, in order to suppress the anxiety that arises from awareness of death, rely on their own cultural values and worldview, and try to strengthen and maintain them.
According to this theory, by affirming the worth of the self and the culture of the group they belong to, people hold on to the sense that “I live in a meaningful world,” and so ease their anxiety about death.
People cannot bear the reality that “I will die.” So they seek a symbolic “self after death” in religion or ideas, achievements or fame, children or works. That, it says, is how they indirectly keep “the fear of death” at a distance.
When I learned about this theory, I caught my breath. The people who avoided talking with me hadn’t ignored me, either. They simply hadn’t been ready to face the “fear of death” within themselves.
Thinking of it that way, my urge to blame them faded.
There is a limit to empathy. People can’t easily respond to “what they haven’t experienced.” That is a fact. But that doesn’t mean all we can do is stay silent.
If you can’t find words for someone’s sorrow, there is still the attitude of “I’m listening.” There is the stance of “I won’t sink with you, but I am here.”
“I don’t understand, but you must be exhausted.” Those words from my senior colleague taught me a kind of distance that doesn’t force understanding, yet still affirms me.
And the words of the friend who told me, “I’ll always be here,” gave me a support that offered nothing more than words, but simply stayed by my side in silence.
For me, in the middle of my loss, they were words that taught me the right “distance between people” — neither too much, nor indifferent.
You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to be able to do anything. But rather than silence, turn your gaze toward them. That becomes the one point of contact that keeps a grieving person from being isolated.
In a society that cannot speak of death, let us at least be able to speak of sorrow. As I write this, I find myself thinking again that I want to help make even a little room for that.