Mark is still dead. I don't think about it for days and days. I'm busy. Then I remember and I think, STILL dead? Every other phase of our lives no matter how Shitty if we can just see the point of it or bear it anyway if we don't will surely end sooner or later. Yoga teaches this in microcosm. Terribly painful but it will end. And you can do anything for a minute. And what is time except a minute at a time? Patti Smith, she says to Fred after almost 20 years, You've been gone long enough. But he won't come back. Aaron isn't dead but I think of his absence constantly. All the time, to me he is gone, and I think of it as I am doing now. The absence of the living is distracting for the outrage it occasions in us, for it is a choice no? The absence of the dead fades because there is no point being outraged, I think, so our minds walk off from it after awhile as if from a show after the credits. But maybe the living have no choice either. Away everyman goes, somehow, inevitably.