The Choice

Greg cried as he recounted this. “I’m losing you too,” he said to his
wife.
Renée’s face darkened, her eyes looked blacked out. We waited for
her to speak.
“How dare you,” she ĕnally said. “Jeremy doesn’t get to dance.
Why should you? I can’t turn my back on him so easily.”
Her tone was hostile. Venomous. I expected Greg to wince. He
shrugged instead. I realized this wasn’t the ĕrst time that Renée had
perceived his experience of happiness as a desecration of their son’s
memory. I thought of my mother. Of all the times I had seen my
father try to nuzzle her, kiss her, and how she would rebuff his
affection. She was so stuck in the early loss of her own mother that she
hid herself in a shroud of melancholy. Her eyes would sometimes light
up when she heard Klara play the violin. But she never gave herself
permission to laugh from the belly, to flirt, to joke, to rejoice.
“Renée, honey,” I said. “Who’s dead? Jeremy? Or you?”
She didn’t answer me.
“It doesn’t do Jeremy any good if you become dead too,” I told
Renée. “It doesn’t do you any good either.”
Renée wasn’t in hiding from her pain, as I had once been. She had
made it her husband. In marrying herself to her loss, she was in hiding
from her life.
I asked her to tell me how much space she was allowing for grief in
her daily life.
“Greg goes to work. I go to the cemetery,” she said.
“How often?”
She looked insulted by my question.
“She goes every day,” Greg said.
“And that’s a bad thing?” Renée snapped. “To be devoted to my
son?”
“Mourning is important,” I said. “But when it goes on and on, it