The End is a series about end-of-life issues.

The famous East Indian fable of the mustard seed reminds us that no one is immune to tragedy. A grieving mother goes to the gods in her despair and demands that her dead son be resurrected and returned. The gods agree — if she can bring them a mustard seed from a house that has lost neither child nor parent, spouse nor sibling nor friend. The desperate mother roams door to door, returning empty-handed — and with a new understanding of the inevitability of loss.

A year and a half ago, my husband, David Bosnick, whom I’d known and loved since high school, died suddenly while warming up in a workout room, the healthiest dead man on earth. We had no warning. We were in Northern Ireland on a Fulbright, and had been there less than a month when disaster struck.

In 1996, a close friend and colleague, Constance Coiner, went down in the T.W.A. Flight 800 explosion off Long Island. My first husband, the novelist John Gardner, died in a motorcycle accident a week after we divorced. We were still best friends. The last thing he said to me was, “I love you terribly.”

All this by way of saying, I am no stranger to shock and grief and loss. Or, as my son likes to say, “Mom, you should come with a warning label.”

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This past year, to keep myself sane, I published a running commentary on Facebook, titled “Rules for Widowhood.” Mostly it was tongue-in-cheek advice: Learn how to repair things; buy yourself flowers; cook real meals. Now and then I offered whatever scraps of wisdom I had gathered, for example: The only way through grief is through.

The only way through is through — easier said than done. We humans will do almost anything to escape pain. We may replace one pain with another less painful though more harmful one — witness the alcoholic, the drug addict. As Emily Dickinson wrote, we sleepwalk through addiction “that covers the abyss with trance.”

We may even con ourselves into thinking we can replace the irreplaceable. When Constance, who had short, blond hair, died in the plane crash, I cut off my hair and dyed it blond. When people asked me to explain this startling — and wildly unflattering — fashion move, the best I could come up with was that something golden had vanished from the world, and I had to replace it.

When a beloved dies, we find ourselves thinking, behaving, even looking like the departed. Sons start wearing the clothing of their late father — or take up his habit of pipe smoking, or of organizing the family outings. They become more fatherly toward their friends. Something in the world has been lost. We instinctively move forward to fill that gap.

The danger increases when we try to replace the irreplaceable with something outside ourselves — whether alcohol or pills (to cover an abyss with trance) or a new belief system (ditto) or some other person who resembles the beloved (ditto). This figure need not be the same age or gender of the absent one — as long as he or she possesses qualities that distinctly remind one of the dead. If you think you have found your lost beloved — run! What you have found is a mirage. It may get you part way through the desert, but the closer you get, the more likely it is to disappear as a phantasm. And there you are, stuck in a desert.

After David died, a widowed upstate neighbor stopped by on a condolence call. We skipped the pleasantries and dove to the heart of things. She explained that four years in, she was feeling more independent, took more risks, exhibited more courage — all of which she attributed to the loving support of her late husband. She warned there would be days I’d want to turn my face to the wall and give up.

She also warned about the mirage effect, though she didn’t call it that. She simply told me that a little way in to the mourning process, she became deeply disconsolate, feeling betrayed by someone close to her. As my neighbor and I got to know each other better, it evolved that a new friend she had come to rely on – as she could always rely on her late husband — turned away at a vulnerable moment. When the mirage reveals itself, it’s like a second death. Worse, it forces you to relive the first loss. You thought you could escape the agony of absence — for a time you nearly did — and then the whole house of cards collapses.

What, then, are mourners to do? Should they never love, never befriend, or trust again? Of course not. But it’s probably wise to move slowly. Hence the advice to make no major decision in the first year after a death — don’t buy or sell a house, start a relationship, change jobs, etc. I have had my own mirage moments, though not a bad romance like my friend suffered. Now and then they are literal mirages — I see a broad-shouldered figure with blond curly hair, and my heart lifts, my pace quickens — for an instant I think, Aha! Of course! David’s back. I knew it all along. What a laugh we’ll have over this!

Occasionally we all lean on someone who, as David would have said, “folded like a cheap chair.” But how many others bear us up! My daughter, son and I have been incredibly lucky. We have remarkable friends, colleagues and family, a loving community here in Binghamton, N.Y.; we’ve been helped in a hundred surprising ways. Belfast, where David died so suddenly, turned out to be the single most tender and generous community I’ve ever known. And ultimately, even in the face of absence of loneliness we must learn that we, ourselves, are there. It may not feel like much. In the end it may save us.

I won’t dye my hair again to recreate the lost golden one. But I still hope to become more like my beloved late husband — in fact, either of my late husbands would do. I have twice married men vastly my superior. That’s no illusion, it’s the simple truth. They were shining examples of selflessness and service; kindness, magnetism and generosity. (And yes, both had flaws. Both were notoriously sloppy, for instance, and were great storytellers, i.e., expert liars.) I want to be more like them when I grow up. Even now, even now, I want my tombstone to read: She was lucky in love.



Liz Rosenberg is a creative writing professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, a poet and the author, most recently, of “The Moonlight Palace.”