Hope in Negative Spaces

After my husband's death

On these long flights, I feel myself suspended in hours of non-places, hoping for a realization.

My son sleeps. I plug in not to distract but to willfully dive into the horror of grief in The Thing with Feathers¹, where a life-size crow represents the demons of fear and responsibilities, hoping to get angry, to find catharsis…only to sit in the curiosity of the comfort of being understood and remind myself that the title is homage to Dickinson —

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

You’ve been gone for so long now. Time should not be moving like this. I come back to Fukuoka with fear but also the hope to feel your presence.

Instead, it was absence that greeted me as we heaved open the heavy door with our suitcases and the groceries and flowers from the kind person we barely know who offered to pick us up at the airport.

And yes, negative space is a kind of real, and, yes, you are taking root in our hearts.²

I see the handwritten note you gave me in March offering support, optimism, and love, love, love, love, love…

Never, never, never, never, never.³

The absurdity of life made you silently scream. You took it inside you and tried to put the puzzle back together, to make the world whole again. Even the most brave and strong among us cannot hold that much.

You had a silent and invisible labor – for students who could impact the world, and for us – me and Buzz, family and friends…so many of us. Your job was a vocation, your fathering a joy. Strength was your pharmakon⁴.

You never needed someone to help. Except for those moments at home when we talked and held each other and planned holidays to relax or watched a BBC murder mystery or played Scrabble (and you always unapologetically won).

How many times in my recent communications all over the world have I heard that you left a gaping hole in someone’s life? That you were one of the special ones?

“Dying is the opposite of leaving.”⁵

Drawing by Buzz, Father’s Day, 2025

There is only love and not its other side, the one they say always sits so close to it. In death, I feel my understanding of you – my love - grow even deeper, more alive somehow. Even as the reality of forever-abandonment sinks in, the negative space of the next fifty years. The paradoxes are everywhere. More alive in death. And then the urgent feeling that spirals in the mind that I must speak to you, must hold you, must tell you I understand, I love, I love, I love…

Other dichotomies take on new meaning. And juxtaposition. Sadness and joy are intertwined. I cry, I laugh. Tears stream as I play football with my son or we share a happy memory or I turn to where you would be standing to share something funny he’s just done.

“Happiness / was hiding in the last tear!”⁶

(Un)lucky. The lack of luck is obvious. But I find myself telling others how lucky I feel – for the time with you, for the people all over the world who are there for me. For the vision of the world that you carried.

The word is interchangeable with fate. It knows that my mind is constantly trying to make sense of this, to fix this, to find a way out of the loop. Instead, people cut through my complex relationship with truth and want to know how I feel.

How are you?

What does it mean? You would know what to do now, or how to feel. You would help me.

Though I lack the answer, still I respond, still I hope they keep asking. I am functioning, sometimes laughing, working through an incredible amount of admin. I am mothering, eating, sometimes sleeping, now starting to write. I am noticing beauty. I am talking with you in my heart. I am crying at odd times. I am going vacant and blank whilst playing catch. I am scrolling through photographs and reading old cards and even grocery lists with your handwriting. I am wondering what will happen next.

“We can check on what people say by seeing what they do.”⁷

You were a good person. I see it in your recently started journal, too: I am a good person. I’ve heard you say it with conviction, but it’s good to see it in your handwriting.

Fiction and reality blend. I’ve always lived this way. Some might say I don’t want to admit or accept you’re gone, and they would be right. But also this: the world’s truths are sometimes better understood in abstraction, in stories and metaphors. It also makes the pain a little more bearable. It lets you live a little in my universe.

The day you died, I published a story and it was about you and it was not.⁸ It was fiction, but you were there living inside of the story. And it had been scheduled a week or two before but it arrived just hours after you perished, energetically releasing something of your struggle and your spirit.

Will I write more of you here? Always no and always yes – the metaphors say all – you move through my heart and my pen as you always have, maybe even before we met ten years ago. I have so much more to say.

You never wrote much yourself, besides those cards of gratitude and love and your dissertation. Your actions were expression, were in the selfless everyday that never asked for thanks. I filtered your undying strength into words, abstractly in contact with your visions, your joys, your sadness, your optimism, and everything else.

Most tragic to me is that we were on the eve of moving to the English countryside for a simpler life, one we had accidentally tried out during the pandemic, a place where you could return to teaching⁹. Was that fiction? We were already living that way though only in the cracks between everything else. Eating nearly every meal as a family, playing cards at the pub, walking or cycling to the park, taking trips to enjoy food, sun, snow whenever we could squeeze them in. Being more than Becoming. You taught me how to do nothing on the beaches of Croatia where we were married and where we return each year. Work got in the way last summer, but we shall return this year for you, carrying you in our hearts as we swim the salty seas, unforgiving in their moon-led movements that wash over us, sparkling brightly on the surface to cover the depths of a beautiful existence.

MJK, “Daddy” — 1981-2026
we love you infinity

Bexhill-on-Sea, England, 2020

1. Dylan Southern’s adaptation of the novella by Max Porter.

2. Meditations on negative space.

3. King Lear, after Cordelia’s death.

4. A strength and a poison. See Plato and Derrida, which I discuss in this podcast.

5. “Love Letter From The Afterlife,” Andrea Gibson

6. “Crying,” Galway Kinnell

7. Being Good, Simon Blackburn. I also like this quote -

“We may worry that the witness has the whole of time and space in its gaze, and our life shrinks to nothingness, just an insignificant, infinitesimal fragment of the whole. ‘The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me,’ said Blaise Pascal (1623–62). But the Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903–30) replied: Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.”

8. “Lost in Fukuoka” (April 14, 2026)

9. My son and I are still moving to England’s Peak District this summer. Earlier, I landed an exciting part-time opportunity as the director of a book festival, a job posting my husband found for me. More on that later, and let us know when you’re in town.