This is what he did: he died suddenly of a rare cancer. One week from diagnosis to death. His wife called me. I sent flowers, I saved the funeral notice to my desktop computer, but did not attend the services. 

When I think of it, I wonder if this is what it is all about, this peculiarly empty spot, a tear in the fabric of the universe. It is like one of those places in the sky where there are no stars. It has something to do with the Big Bang, with the cosmos distributing itself unevenly, the gases and dark matter and dark energy and all of the mysteries of the heavens clumped like clods of mud. I think of a man whose birthday happened to fall on the day my father died. And this man died about two years ago, on a date I don't remember, I would have to look up the obituary I scanned into my desktop and that would entail leaving my laptop and going downstairs and searching through my poorly organized files.

It would mean overcoming my fear of grief. Not my grief, because none exists.

None.

There is grief out there, someone must feel it, his wife and children of course - were there four or five? - and I am afraid of running into it, brushing up against it in the supermarket, nearly colliding with it at an intersection the way that semitrailer almost hit me, I would have been dead in an instant had the driver not laid on his horn and had I not floored it and then pulled over to the side of the road, shaking, sitting there for ten minutes until my hands were steady enough to start up the ignition again. 

A tear in the universe. He was always tearing his clothes, he was big. The universe could not contain him.

I gave him a sweater once, one I could not afford. It ripped at the shoulder. His mother quoted the price to him. I hadn't left the tag on or anything, she was just the kind of mother who knew which stores sold which brands and determined through one look at the label that I had spent far too much for someone who was not engaged to be married to, and that she would not approve of any such engagement, she had already decided I was not the right one for him.

He asked me if I could exchange the sweater for a bigger size.

He told me once that there was a envelope with my address on it locked in his desk, and that his wife had strict instructions to return it to me, unopened, in the event of his death.

I'm still waiting.

It's not so much that the contents are personal (although they are) but that they are over thirty years old, and embarrassing. I want to feed them through my shredder without reading them. 

Because I do not need to read them, they are committed to memory, and for someone to stumble upon them and, in spite of instructions, read them, would cause pain to that person.  

Last month I went out with my husband and looked at the stars last night, Ursa Major and all the constellations I could not recognize. My husband was carrying a bottle of Scotch. We were vacationing in a place where we were close to one of the Great Lakes, an inland sea really, and between the rocky shore of the dark water and the drink we stumbled but we looked up and saw the majesty of the heavens and I was reminded of another time spent looking at the stars, long ago. And I had to finish off the Scotch. To remind myself that even though I sent flowers, I did not attend the funeral. I stayed away.

And that I do not grieve.

And that I never will. 

I never will.

And the universe will forever be torn.