Blessed are the Well-Wishers, I Guess

What you write about and what you want to write about are two different things a lot of the time.

I want to write about how some condolences feel like diagnostic quests. How are you doing? No, how are you really doing? Is that when I tell them I scrolled through all the texts from my daughter while she was hospitalized in the month before she died to see if our back and forth was strained or relaxed? Was I remembering things the way they were? Were the hours we sat in her hospital room easy or hard? Had her old resentments been stowed away or were they lying on the thin sheet at the foot of her bed but I just didn’t see them. Do I tell them that I think all the time about when I washed her hair in the tiny hospital room sink, how reconciling and fleeting that was?

I don’t say any of these things.

Yesterday, I walked into a shop of a nonprofit group that helps trafficked women begin new lives. They sell soap and candles and notecards and hats, and the shop smells like the lightest cleanest place on earth. The program’s director met me at the door. She smiled, glad to see me, and I could tell from her eyes that she knew what had happened to our family. But she didn’t ask. And I was grateful for that. For having her silent acknowledgement of our daughter’s death and our family’s challenges but being spared the piercing look, the How are you doing? No, how are you really doing?

It’s ill-mannered to criticize well wishers of any ilk. They mean well, my mother would say. So I don’t criticize, I just buckle up when I’m around them, drive faster to get out of traffic, roll the windows down so I hear nothing but the wind and sirens in the distance.

That’s what I write about today. It’s neither here nor there.