As anyone who has grieved for a loved one knows, these are the dark days, the hard days. Carol is getting showered with advice, most of it telling her how bad things will be now that Ed is gone, how lonely she will get, how much pain and misery is ahead of her.

Something about Americans, especially those on social media, revel in telling other people how difficult things  can be, how dangerous and dark. I don’t much care for unwanted advice, and I very rarely give it.

Grieving is one of the most intensely personal and individual experiences in all of life, and I have no  right to tell Carol how she will feel and when, or whether the worst days are behind her or ahead of her. The only thing I do tell her, the only thing I know, is that this is a process and she is in it, and she will come out the other side alive and living her life, something that is unimaginable to her now, in these days of shock and loneliness.

I have not seen much of Carol since Ed’s funeral, she was busy with her family at the County Fair, and I was up to my neck in refugee business in Albany and work for the Mansion residents.

We had plans to visit today, but a friend showed up to visit with her and she wrote me to beg off. We are supposed to have dinner tomorrow night with her.

I didn’t realize that one of the great fears of the newly grieving is that everyone in their lives will vanish and leave them alone. This happens very often, and  Carol is warned about it every day by neighbors and online purveyors of gloom seeking to share their misery and need to warn.

“It’s nice to be doing things,” Carol wrote me, “but I know pretty soon I will be alone and people will forget! But I can always count on your and Maria.”

People will forget, and there is no reason they should all grieve with Carol. They didn’t all lose loved ones last week.

Most people don’t really wish to be around grieving, it frightens them for obvious reasons.

People get on with their lives, as they should, and the grieving are often left angry and alone with their loss and sorrow. We are a Darwinian culture obsessed with making money, and there is no money is helping people grieve, at least not yet.

I don’t actually think Carol will be alone, she has loving children and grandchildren, and a community around her that is committed to helping one another. I can’t say how she will grieve, nor is it my business to tell her.

I know a lot of people who have gone through the grieving process, not two are remotely the same. People have this curious need to assume that their experience is universal.

I wrote back to Carol that I will never forger her or leave her alone, and neither will Maria. I encouraged her once again to be careful who she listens to, this is a time to be around positive and nourishing people eager to live their lives, not live by the expectations of the legions of doom.

I believe we are all responsible for ourselves in the long haul, and Carol is tough and smart, she will live the kind of life she wants to iive and decides to live, in her own way and in her own time.

She doesn’t need for me to tell her that, she needs and will  come to see it herself. I have a good friend who lost his wife in a car crash some years ago, “you have no idea how strong you can be until you need to know,” he told me.

Carol adored Ed,  he dominated her world, she is understandably and appropriate devastated by his loss. She suffers from clinical depression. She is also full of feeling and life and is eager to engage with the world after decades of milking cows and riding around in tractors and, to be frank, living in Ed’s towering shadow.

We are all eager to see and rejoice in the emerging Carol. It is coming.

In the meantime, I will make this promise to her and to you. We will not ever forget about Carol, she is an integral part of our lives, our creativity, and our  history together. There are some things in her life that we can share, some things we can’t.

It will be great to see her tomorrow.