This Thing Between Us

Thiago’s experiences after Vera’s death demonstrate how horrifying and life-altering grief can be. Once he begins to suffer under grief’s suffocating weight, it changes him and makes him unrecognizable to most other people. The novel suggests that part of what makes Thiago’s grief unbearable is the fact that it is indescribable, isolating him from others and evading his attempts to contain it. At the same time, Thiago’s efforts to overcome his sense of isolation and chaos are halfhearted, as his suffering itself feels all-important.

Thiago senses, early on, that his grief changes him as a person. He compares losing Vera to “having an arm amputated and complaining that you can still feel the phantom hand balled into a fist” (62). An amputation is a permanent change, and having one’s arm removed means one must learn to do everything with the other hand; it changes one into a person with something missing, and this is just how Thiago feels without Vera. He can live without her, but everything is different now. He says that, to others, grief is “a storm you weather […] [e]xcept it doesn’t feel that way. No journey, no thing to endure” (62). Instead of anticipating better times ahead and the lessening of the pain he feels, Thiago considers himself forever altered, like those “trees that manage to grow around power lines and stay mangled forever” (62). Later, he describes himself as “deformed” and “hobbled […] by [Vera’s] absence” (119). Every description, every metaphor suggests a loss from which there can be no recovery.

Moreover, Thiago’s experiences point to the irrational dimensions of grief. He blames himself for Vera’s death even though it is never unambiguously established that he has cause to do so. This deepens his suffering, yet he feels an overwhelming need to preserve his guilt and grief so that his memory of Vera will not fade. After being out in the woods chasing Brimley, he tells Vera, “It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes we were out there, but it was ten minutes where you weren’t on my mind, and the guilt made my throat close” (119). Similarly, when he watches a replay of her accident in the woods, he tries to catch Vera but can’t. Though it isn’t really her in the woods, he interprets this moment as “[p]roof of how [he] failed [her]. Of [his] guilt [and] helplessness” (149). These episodes underscore the trap that grief poses, as any momentary reprieve becomes a sign of betrayal and thus cause for further suffering. As Thiago says after Vera’s funeral, Thiago says, “I didn’t want to light a candle, or release a balloon. To do one thing to mean another thing. My wife […] was dead. And I didn’t want to synthesize it into something else” (64). The passage extends the framing of grief as endlessly perpetuating itself; here, the mere attempt to make meaning of the experience risks undermining it.

Thus, Thiago becomes increasingly mired in his despair. As his reflections on the “storm” metaphor suggest, the experience of grief is difficult to communicate to others, yet even if he could describe it, it is unclear that he would want to, for fear of cheapening his relationship with Vera or dishonoring her memory. In the end, the weight of grief thus drives Thiago to suicide (or a suicide attempt since it’s unclear whether he survives the “coalescing moment”). Thiago takes all his Vicodin and washes it down with champagne, planning to get in the tub and allow himself to “slip away,” as grief has created a situation in which both healing and not healing feel equally untenable.