The Bot Wrote My Grief. I Don't Know If I Feel It Anymore

After the funeral, I asked the assistant to help me write about losing him. It produced something so exact, so tender, that I published it. Everyone said it was beautiful. I have not been able to cry since.

The piece was for the memorial newsletter. I could not write it myself; every attempt came out as a list of facts with no blood in them. Someone suggested the assistant. I typed the facts: the way he laughed, the garage, the fishing, the last week. The assistant asked questions. I answered them, crying into the keyboard. Then it wrote.

What it wrote was better than anything I have ever written. It found the metaphor I had been circling: the garage as a cathedral, the tools as relics. It placed the facts in an order that made them mean something. It was so good that I published it under my name, and the newsletter went out, and people I had not spoken to in years wrote to say it had moved them.

And here is the thing I cannot tell anyone: I have not cried since. Not at the memorial. Not at the emails. Not at the words themselves, which I have read a hundred times, checking them like a wound. The writing did the grieving for me, the way a machine does the math, and I am left with the sum and none of the working.

The piece is good. That is the worst part. It is exactly right, and it is mine, sort of, and it has absorbed the grief that was supposed to pass through me. I have started reading other people's grief now, real grief, written by hand, and I can feel the difference, and the difference is the thing I have lost.

I am trying to write it myself again, badly, by hand, the way I used to. The sentences are clumsy. The feelings are real. It is not as good as the machine's version, and I have decided that I do not care, because the clumsiness is mine, and the feelings are mine, and I would rather be moved by my own bad sentences than admired for the machine's perfect ones. The newsletter is done. The grief is not. I am working on it, one bad sentence at a time, and for the first time in weeks, I think I might be getting somewhere.