“Whenever someone who knows you disappears…”

Winnie Lim quotes Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet:

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

Reading this, I realize that I’ve spent the four years since my father and Catherine died in succession missing this point: no matter the nature of our relationships, they formed part of my definition of myself, through their own construction of who and how I was.

When they disappeared, I lost that buttress.

It’s both freeing and destabilizing.