I keep trying to explain it to Jana and not finding the right sentence.
It's not that I'm fine. She keeps asking if I'm fine and I keep saying something that's close to true but not quite it. What I'm trying to say is: the things I thought I was made of have turned out to be what the job gave me. Not bad things. Not performances. Real things, a sense of direction, a reason to be somewhere at a particular time, a feeling that my presence in the world was doing something. Those were real. And they came from the job, and the job is gone.
What I'm trying to understand is what's left.
The boys call on Sundays. They are fine. They have their own lives now, which is what you want, which is why you put in all the years. I watch them on the phone and feel proud in a way that's clean and uncomplicated, and then the call ends and the house is quiet again.
Jana makes dinner. We eat. We talk about things. I don't know how to tell her that I'm not sad, exactly. I'm something more like: I used to know what I was doing and now I don't. And instead of that being frightening the way I thought it would be, it's mostly just accurate. This is the situation. I am in it.
There's something underneath the not-knowing that I can't name. I sit with it in the mornings before Jana is awake, with the coffee, and I pay attention to it. It doesn't feel like grief. It doesn't feel like nothing. It feels more like: a floor.
I don't know if this is what courage is. I always assumed courage was something you did. This feels more like something you find out you have after everything else has been taken away to see what's there.
I told my father once that I was afraid of failing. He said: you will fail. That's not the question.
I didn't know what question he meant. I think I'm starting to.