Billy Ansel gets it

“Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. And if you loved the person a great deal… your sense of who you are will have been clarified many times, and so you will have many such moments to remember. I have learned that.” 43

“The only way I could go on living was to believe that I was not living. I can’t explain it; I can only tell you how it felt. I think it felt that way for a lot of people in town. Death permanently entered our lives with that accident… for us there was life, true life, real life, no matter how bad it had seemed, before the accident, and nothing that came after the accident resembled it in any important way. So for us, it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water-filled sand pit, and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.” 72-73

“The truth is that I’m beyond help; most people are; and it only angers me to see my sisters or my friends here in town wasting their time. To forestall or cover my anger, I jump in front of them, and suddenly I myself have turned into the person come to provide comfort, reassurance, help whatever it is they originally desired to provide me with. I take their occasion and make it my own. I never know this at the time, of course; only afterwards, when I’m alone again, sitting in my living room with a glass of whiskey in my hand, brooding over my solitude, trying to generate a little feeling, even if its only self-pity.” 76

“People who have lost their children… twist themselves into all kinds of weird shapes in order to deny what has happened. Not just because of the pain of losing a person they have loved- we lose parents and mates and friends, and no matter how painful, its not the same- but because what has happened is so wickedly unnatural, so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it. It’s almost beyond belief or comprehension that the children should die before the adults. It flies in the face of biology, it contradicts history, it denies cause and effect, it violates basic physics, even. It’s the final contrary.” 78

“I don’t know why I was there, staring with strange loathing and awe at the wrecked yellow vehicle, as if it were a beast that had killed our children and then in turn been slain by the villagers and dragged here to a place where we could all come, one by one, and verify that it was safely dead. But I did want to see it, to touch it with my hands, maybe in a primitive way to be sure finally that we had indeed killed it.” 81