The Unresilient

…And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder. 

—“Encounter,” Czeslaw Milosz

*

My wife, Aura Estrada, died in Mexico City on July 25, 2007, after breaking her neck the day before while bodysurfing at a beach on the Pacific Coast. She was thirty, and we’d been together for four years, married for two. Aura’s mother and an uncle blamed me for the accident, and even threatened me with prison. It is understandable that her mother, having lost her only child, in her unimaginable grief, maybe even maddened by grief, would blame me. But I was close to mad with grief myself.

The day of Aura’s funeral I scribbled a note that I intended to put into her coffin, but then I couldn’t, because the coffin was sealed, a window over her face. In the note I thanked Aura for the happiest years of my life, asked her forgiveness for failing to protect her from that wave that killed her, and promised that instead of killing myself, I would fulfill these promises: I would get a book of her writing published. I would start a literary prize in her name. I also vowed to live each day in a way that would honor her.

I still have that note. It wasn’t until I started writing this, and I looked at it again, that I realized one of the promises I’d remembered making wasn’t, in fact, written there. I’d promised Aura that I was going to write a book about her and about us, a book for her.

Why write a book at all? Because I had no other way of processing what had happened. According to grief experts, if you’ve witnessed the death of your beloved in an unexpected, sudden, and violent way, and if that beloved was what they call “an attachment figure,” the person who really was the greatest source of happiness and meaning in your life, then you are prone to traumatic or complicated grief; if your beloved’s family also blames you for the death, inevitably causing you to internalize that burden of guilt—which you may well have done even without the blame—that will probably complicate matters even more. Neurological imaging reveals the lesions trauma inflicts on the brain’s pathways. That is one reason why traumatic grief, when you are really inside it, harrowing...