"When I awoke the next morning..."

it was much like any other day. Some people who had been alive the day before no longer were. The only difference in this case was that I knew, loved one of them.

I’d stood beside Buffy’s grave some short months after I started as her Watcher. That was a spell, or a delusion. I didn’t have to wake up the next morning and face her death again. But Jenny didn’t come back; she wasn’t a Slayer. So for quite some time after Angelus snapped her neck, each morning, just after waking there would come that moment that my brain would register, yes, Jenny is still dead.

Many people have had to face that unhappy (despairing? anguished? crucifying?) realization about a loved one but until one faces it oneself...well...one doesn’t understand the sorrow at all.

Then, eventually, comes the day when that isn’t your first thought. You might not think it for an hour or two. It becomes your history. The person becomes less alive, less a person and more an incident in your life, something that happened to you. Because you’re still alive, you see. It’s a normal, natural and no doubt necessary phenomenon that happens so that civilization can go on. It’s also like having her die again. She becomes a soft-edged, romantic memory. Not like the contradictory, surprising, provocative, laughing woman she was. So, I destroyed the photos I had; should anyone mention her I change the subject or leave.

I won’t have it. I don’t want her to be less than she was.

I refuse to think of her, to remember her; that’s the very least I owe her.