I keep meaning to post more about kathlaw, but my thoughts keep shifting about too much, scattered thoughts that don’t stay long enough to cohere.

Like about all the small odds and ends we keep finding in our lives that somehow tie back to her, in ways I’d half-forgotten, the past few years. Kathlaw was one of the witnesses at our elopement. She was the reason we began inviting friends to our seders. She introduced me to Into the Woods and bought us our first set of real glassware. She and I arrived in Tucson at the same time, the same week even; it took me a year after I decided to move to actually get here, but once she decided she was here within three weeks.

Like about how something about the nature of a suicide turns everything oddly harsh, as if the world were being viewed beneath white fluorescent lights for a time. About how that harshness leaves room for a great deal of kindness, but not, perhaps, for much gentleness.

Like about how my thoughts about what we do and don’t have the right to do with our own lives have been shifting.

Like about how odd it is that so much of the posting and talking has been about us, and not her. About how that’s part of what makes it so awful–when you do something like this it does stop being about you, and start being about the rest of us.

Like about how I keep thinking anger is giving way to a purer sort of sorrow; and then I think no, it isn’t, not yet.

Like about how all the rest of us really are mostly all right, or will be, and about how there’s something strange and yet true about that, too.