“Everyone typically thinks that when you're intimately close to someone, like your husband or your wife or your mom or your dad, that it opens you up so much to all these powerful feelings of connectedness and enables you to understand the other person with such incredible empathy. But I really think that when you become habituated to someone, it can actually do completely the opposite—totally anesthetize you, totally numb you out and blind you to the other person. But then you'll be somewhere completely random or you'll just be reading, and you'll come upon something so abstract, like, I don't know, an equation in a math book or some mask in a museum or a comment by a complete stranger on YouTube, and suddenly you're just flooded with all this raw emotion. I really think that the idea of grieving for a father, I mean in theory—the abstract notion of children grieving for fathers—can actually cause us to experience so much more anguish than our own personal grief for our own fathers....Do you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?”

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