I ought to thank you. I ought to open my mouth and mutter, just loud enough so you can hear but soft enough so you won't know I'm screaming on the inside, and say those two words. I ought to do it, not because I owe it to you or to myself or to anyone in particular, but because I don't want to cause an ugly scene. Not here, on this day.
Because today's the day they buried my brother. My kid brother that I've loved since the day they told me he was going to be born. The kid brother I asked Santa Clause for every year since I was five, and finally got, three days after Christmas, when I was ten. Today they put him in the ground and covered him with dirt and then, "since they were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs." Frost knew what he was talking about. Death is only hard on the living, and only because it disrupts the life they are leading. Disrupts, but doesn't destroy - Death's cruel little irony.
Here, in this elegant little funeral parlor where strangers and family members pace around with teary eyes and solemn faces, I can't bring myself to break into the sobs or the curses or the ranting speeches I desperately want to make. It wouldn't be right, somehow. It wouldn't be right by my kid brother. So I really ought to thank you. I ought to say something, anyway, because I can tell from the slightly uncomfortable look in your eyes that I've hesitated too long in answering you. You're starting to shift your weight around a bit, uncomfortable in this awkward silence I've created by taking so long to respond. You're wondering if maybe it was a bad idea to say anything at all. Maybe it was. You see, I hate when people tell me that everything is going to be alright. It's not that I don't believe them, because in a twisted way I do. I hate it when they say that because I know that the only response they want back from me is the bland, grateful "Thank you" that I ought to have said by now. Or at least a "Yes, you're right." You want me to nod and agree so you can smugly congratulate yourself on having carried out some kind of duty in comforting me.
And it isn't even your smugness I hate. What I hate about that horrible, obnoxious, fucking phrase "Everything will be okay" is how I must, every time, swallow back the litany that stupid sentence ignites in my head. Every damn time, those words set off the speech that I've written in my head, like a tape recording I can't turn off.
See, whenever I hear those words, I want to tell you that you have accomplished the extraordinary task of being both a wise man and a fool. Because you're right. Everything will be better; it will be okay again someday. Someday, the holes my brother's death tore in my heart will seal over, and I'll be more or less healed. Whole again. Different, maybe, but whole.
But what smug people like you don't say, because you don't seem to know, is that soon after everything becomes okay, it will all go to shit again. I want to tell you, and all the other "everything will be better soon" people, that you've missed the rest of the picture, that you're only looking at half the storybook.
I think that's what's really wrong in the world. Some of the people in the world argue that a life is a success story with a few low points, that every main character (because we are all the main character in our own life story) must go through the trials and tribulations before reaching the happy ending. Others argue that it's the other way round, and every story is a tragedy with the occasional bright spots to highlight the darkness and failure and eventual, inevitable, terrible end. And the world is torn apart by these people who can't agree whether life is a few lows amid many highs or a few highs among a series of lows.
They're all wrong.
No matter how bad things get, they will inevitably get better. And then, also inevitably, they will plunge again. And again. And again.
And there are no endings, happy, tragic, or otherwise, because nothing ends. Ever. We labor under the delusion that every book must close because we believe death to be the ultimate high - or low - point of any life. But it isn't. It's just another one. My brother died. But in a way, he didn't end. His story is going on still, somewhere else. He's still the main character in his own book; you've just lost the ability to read it.
He hasn't ended - how could he? I still remember him. So does my mother. My father. His friends. The grocer he bought his sandwiches from. We all remember, and will until we die. And even then, he hasn't ended, because his name is in our family tree, in our history. None of us will ever end. We'll be carried on by our children, and theirs. By strangers who recall our faces or our words when we have forgotten them.
If life is like anything, then it is not like the mountain or the valley. It isn't a high rimmed with lows or a low rimmed with highs - it's a constant flux of high and low, high and low. It is the sea, the tides, the turn of the weightless earth hurtling blindly through the empty space. And the back and forth flow of every single individual life - mine, my brother's, yours - is all just a tiny droplet in the up and down, up and down of our history. Before we can even remember, we have flowed. History repeats? What a stupid thing to say. It's like saying the sky is blue, or humans are mammals. Of course it is, and of course they are. And of course history repeats - it is nothing more than the tide records of our collective lives. If you think your life bobs along in its own little current - stop. Every stream connects to the sea. History is just a record of all the times we, as a people, rose to a high or, as a people, dropped to a low, and then rose and dropped again.
Yes, it will be alright. And then it will be shit. But sooner or later, it will be alright again. And there will be no happy ending, but there will be no tragic one either. There will be, as frightening as it sounds, no ending at all. Only the perpetual rise and fall, rise and fall.

But you can't say all that when someone puts their hand on your shoulder and says, "Don't worry, it will be alright."
Yes, you're absolutely right. And, oh, you're horribly wrong.
But in the meantime, thank you.