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121 " used to write copy. My boss told me: If you gotta say it’s upscale, it ain’t. My boss said, It’s like that guy who tells you he’s funny. "
― Amy Bloom , In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
122 " We eat a couple of cookies in bed and I point out that there’s been a change (not a bad thing but still…) in Rachel Maddow’s lip gloss and he admires my keen eye and we brush the cookie crumbs onto the floor because no one is watching. I plump my pillow so vigorously, it knocks everything off my nightstand, and he laughs and says that I’m a danger to myself and others. Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh. "
123 " Perspective is useful, of course: It’s why very few people want to be eighteen again. But the other side is having so much perspective, it’s hard to give a damn about anything happening here in the real. "
124 " We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time. "
125 " What Yvonne manages to do, in the days after Brian’s diagnosis and in the days after Brian’s death, is to locate herself exactly where all the guide-to-grief people say she should be. At home, by herself, with her daughters or with friends, she lets herself be a mother awash in grief. We have one brief phone call in which she weeps to me that she just wanted more of him, and I feel so much the same way that instead of comforting her, as I intended, I just weep with her and then we mumble our goodbyes into our wet phones. With us, and then later with me, she doesn’t center her grief. She’s careful not to cry first or loudest and she rarely refers to her own loss. She is, as Brian says, a fucking class act. "
126 " I’m waiting in the living room, pretending and knowing that I will be caught and that I am not a widow, I’m just a weeping and annoyed wife. Brian will be gone from my life soon, although I don’t yet know how soon, and he’s also still a man with a cold. It’s a cold, not pleurisy, is what I think, even as I am tearing the fringe off a pillow at the thought of his not being upstairs any longer, not having a cold, not being a sick man than whom there is no one sicker, as I have said to him. One time, I said that I had friends with metastatic breast cancer who complained less about that than he did about his cold. And then he won’t be there for me to say it to him. "
127 " I married him—despite all the very good reasons that no one should ever partner up for a third time—because early on, he reminded me of the best father figure of my life, my ninth-grade English teacher. When that man died, his friends (eighty-year-old poker buddies, pals from his teaching days, devoted former students of all ages and types) wept. He was old, fat, diabetic, and often brusque. Women desired him and my children loved him and most men liked his company a great deal. He was loyal, imperious, needy, charming, bighearted, and just about the most selfish, lovable, and foolishly fearless person I had ever known. And then I met Brian and found another. "