Literature
death of the close-ish
There’s a selfish sort of grief when one of the close-ish die. A neighbor, a distance relative, a friend of a friend that you could have been friends with yourself, if life were different. Close enough to chat, maybe add on FaceBook, but not close enough where their absence is a truly defined loss in your world. You can pretend, at least for a while, that they still exist, somewhere. A friend in another continent, a relative in another state, a person you knew in high school who moved away – their close-ish deaths are bizarrely easy to accept, because the world might be lying to you; they might not be gone. Who are you to know? So
