Somehow, I did get a job that could have made my parents satisfied.
That sentence tells part of the story, but not the whole one. Everything with them had a way of becoming about them — what they expected, what they believed I owed them, what counted as success in their eyes. They never asked what was happening to me. They never asked what Celta had meant to me. They never asked why I was falling apart.
So, yes, I got the kind of job that should have pleased them. I worked as a contractor for the National Science Foundation, developing a network for a museum and writing code in C. In the language my parents understood, I was finally using my Georgia Tech degree. I was working as a software engineer.
My supervisor was impressed with my talents. I met deadlines. I completed deliverables. I did what was expected of me.
But the work itself did not interest me.
I do not say that to diminish the job or the people who valued that kind of work. I had the ability. I could solve problems. I could perform. But the part of me that had awakened through psychology, through therapy, through Georgia Regional Hospital, and through Celta, was not alive in that work.
I wanted to become a psychiatric social worker.
I wanted to understand people, listen to them, help them, and participate in the kind of healing that had changed my own life.
Working, But Not Healing
Decades later, I would learn from my sister that my parents felt I owed it to them to work in engineering because they had paid for my education. That helped explain something I had sensed but could not fully name at the time. They were not merely encouraging me to choose a practical path. They were not saying, “Bruce, we worry that social work will not pay well enough.” That would have been a conversation. That would have acknowledged me as a person with goals and desires.
What they seemed to believe was that my life belonged to an obligation.
No matter what I wanted.
And now, after losing Celta, I was living under their roof again, trying to grieve the first person who had truly loved me while surrounded by people who did not seem curious about the love I had lost.
At work, I could function.
That was not the same as healing.
I could sit at a computer. I could write code. I could attend meetings. I could solve technical problems and meet expectations. From the outside, I may have looked like someone getting back on track.
Inside, I was still standing outside the church in Athens, looking at a closed casket and trying to make reality obey my need for it not to be true.
Learning the Stages, Not Yet Grieving
I did go to grief counseling.
That matters to say, because I was not simply refusing to face what had happened. At the Catholic hospital in Augusta, a nun led a grief counseling group that combined guided imagery, relaxation, prayer, biblical references, and discussion of the stages of grief. I met with her a few times. I even asked for tape recordings of the sessions, as if I could carry her voice home and use it to keep myself from falling apart.
In the group, people were encouraged to bring mementos of the loved ones they had lost. I listened carefully. I was by far the youngest person there. I had studied grief in a psychology class at Georgia Tech, and I read more about it from a clinical standpoint. I knew the language. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
But knowing the stages of grief was not the same as grieving.
I did not deal with Celta’s death.
I was confronted with it.
Sometimes the reality broke through and I cried until there seemed to be nothing left in me. Other times, I studied grief almost clinically, as if understanding the process might keep the pain at a manageable distance. I wanted grief to make sense. I wanted loss to have a map.
But Celta had not been an abstraction.
She had been the person who made me feel seen.
The Silence at Their Home
The silence at my parents’ house was not the silence of respectful privacy.
It was disappearance.
Celta’s name had almost no place there. My grief had no place there. The fact that I had loved someone and been loved by someone did not become a subject of concern, curiosity, comfort, or even awkward conversation.
It was their home, not mine.
I had moved back into the house where I had learned to hide, and now I was carrying the largest grief of my life through rooms where my inner life had never been welcomed. I was not deliberately keeping everything secret. I wanted an opening. I wanted to repair something. I wanted to share the fact that I had found someone who loved me.
There was no opening.
That remains astonishing to me.
My parents did not ask about the grief group. They did not ask what I was writing. They did not ask what Celta had meant to me or why her death had shattered me. They did not ask why a year in which I had seemed more alive than ever had ended with me moving through the house like someone trying not to disappear.
Their silence returned me to the old place inside myself where my needs felt inconvenient, where my feelings were too much, where wanting comfort became a source of shame.
Celta had made me feel ten feet tall. With her, I felt confident, worthwhile, deserving, and alive. She had been interested in my thoughts, my stories, my moods, my dreams. Her letters told me she carried me through her day. I had been important to someone in a way I had never known before.
Then she was gone.
And I was back in the house where my inner life had never been welcome.
Trying to Blur the Edges
I vaguely remember a summer trip to Las Vegas for work-related training. The company paid for it. I had a good per diem, more than enough to cover the hotel room, and I was surrounded by casinos, lights, free drinks, and the surreal brightness of a city built around distraction.
Vegas was probably the worst place for me to go with grief, free cash, and alcohol within easy reach.
Somehow, I made all the presentations and attended the training I was sent there to complete. I do not remember any complaints from my boss. I must have done what was expected of me.
But my memories of that trip do not arrive as a coherent story. They come as fragments. My hands feeling unable to touch the leather inside a car. The sun shimmering on pavement. Casinos. Drinks. Sitting at a poker table. Pulling the lever on a slot machine.
I moved through time like a robot.
The job was going well. I was proud that I could still function. But after Las Vegas, I was drinking more and more. Vodka with tonic or orange juice. Gin and tonic. Whiskey with ice, water, or Coke. Almost anything except beer.
Sometimes I passed out.
Once or twice, I vomited.
I hated throwing up. Always.
Drinking did not make Celta less dead. It did not heal anything. It did not even bring real comfort. It only changed the surface of the moment. It blurred the edges. It gave me temporary distance from the unbearable fact that I would never see her again.
At the time, I still believed in God. That made the loss harder, not easier.
Why show me love and then take it away?
Why let me discover what it meant to be seen, cherished, wanted, and emotionally held, only to have that person die before the questions between us could ever be answered?
I could not wrestle sense out of it.
I tried.
But the questions remained.
A Hollow Attempt to Feel Something
Around that time, I met a woman from the home office of the company that employed me. She lived in Alabama, and I was in Augusta, so we decided to meet in Atlanta, where I had graduated not long before.
My supervisor joked that I had “jungle fever” because I was a white man going out with a Black woman. He was Black himself, and Spike Lee’s film Jungle Fever had recently been released. I was not offended by the comment. I have always been willing to talk about race when the conversation is wanted or needed.
My mother actually asked about my date. I suppose the woman’s name sounded ethnic, and my mother guessed that she might be Italian.
“No,” I said. “She’s Black.”
My mother answered with a simple, “Oh.”
That was it.
I was proud of one thing: she knew not to waste her breath telling me that other people would not approve. My sister had heard that argument when she dated a Black man. I was not going to accept it.
The woman and I met in Atlanta. She brought her child and left him in the car near the Student Center at Georgia Tech, the same building where I had worked in the post office. We looked for places outside where we could be somewhat private after dark. I remember kissing her passionately in a few different locations. I remember feeling her body against mine and being aroused.
It was my first passionate kiss before Lynn.
Did I feel guilty about dating so soon after Celta? Maybe. But guilt is probably too organized a word for what I was experiencing. I was not fully aware then. I was numb. I needed to feel something. I was trying to wake up.
That encounter was pleasurable, but hollow.
It reminded me, in a strange way, of the effect of the tricyclic antidepressant I had been prescribed. For brief moments, the medication could create something that felt almost like positive emotion. I remember standing in the kitchen one morning while my mother ironed something for work and my father got ready nearby, and feeling oddly fine, almost high. The song by R.E.M. comes to mind: “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” and somehow I felt fine.
But those feelings were artificial and temporary.
The date was like that too.
A moment of sensation.
A moment of escape.
Not meaning.
Every ordinary moment with Celta — sitting together, holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, resting in the serenity of being loved — had been more deeply satisfying than the intensity of that physical encounter. That realization only made the loss sharper.
There was no second date. I had expressed my concerns about premarital sex. I was still living under the weight of religious conditioning, and although many Christians found ways to have sex before marriage, I could not make it acceptable to God in my own mind. We were not even in a committed relationship. I drove to Atlanta again, but she never showed up after learning that I was not ready for sex. I was embarrassed and frustrated that I had driven all that way.
Then, strangely, I forgot the matter almost completely by the next day.
The loss of Celta could not be washed away with alcohol, medication, grief counseling, poetry, or a passionate encounter.
Poetry as Witness
Poetry was the one thing that did not feel hollow.
I can thank my mother for introducing me to Martin Kirby, who went to our church and taught English literature and related subjects at a college in Augusta. It is strange that she noticed my interest in poetry. I had long ago given up trying to gain her attention, and yet somehow she knew enough to make that introduction.
Martin became my writing and poetry mentor.
I began going to poetry readings at his home with his wife. I shared poems and received feedback, advice, and guidance on writing good poetry. More than that, they listened as I read poems about Celta and spoke about what had happened between us. That mattered more than I can easily explain.
Martin said he thought it might take ten years before I could write good poetry about Celta because the feelings were too raw.
He was probably right.
But raw poems were still better than silence.
What I Had Learned at Georgia Regional
I do not remember the exact conversations I had with Martin and his wife about my future. I do not want to invent certainty where memory does not give it to me. But I know the kinds of things I needed someone to hear, because they were the things no one in my parents’ house was asking about.
I can imagine sitting there after reading a poem about Celta, the room quiet for a moment, the poem still hanging in the air.
Martin might have asked, “And what about the hospital work? You are still planning to go into psychiatric social work?” The words seemed to appear as a reminder for me to not forget my dream.
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” I would have said. “That’s the part that still makes sense.”
Then I would have tried to explain Georgia Regional Hospital. The following information is what I would have explained over time.
I had gone there because I wanted experience before applying to graduate school. I knew I wanted an MSW. I knew I wanted psychiatric social work. At Georgia Regional, I volunteered with the social work team on the adult intake unit, where new patients arrived. The work was not symbolic. It was not busy work created to make me feel useful. I learned to gather psychosocial histories, to ask people what had brought them to the hospital, to listen to the story beneath the diagnosis.
Some patients could communicate clearly. Others were harder to reach. Some struggled with reality testing. Some had limited insight into why they were there. Some were so affected by severe psychiatric symptoms that conversation itself became difficult.
That was important for me.
I had entered Georgia Tech needing to learn basic social skills. Now I was sitting with people whose illnesses could make communication profoundly complicated. I was learning that listening was not just a social skill. It was a clinical skill. It required patience, empathy, active attention, and the willingness to stay present when the person across from me could not make the conversation easy.
Sometimes I spoke with family members or others involved in the hospitalization. I learned that a person’s crisis did not belong to the patient alone. There were families, histories, fears, conflicts, losses, and interpretations surrounding each admission.
I sat in on staff meetings. I learned about diagnoses, treatment, hospitalization, and the human stories beneath clinical language.
I felt useful there.
I felt that I belonged.
If I told Martin and his wife anything like that, then they were hearing something my parents were not hearing. I was not lost. I was not refusing adulthood. I was not merely avoiding engineering.
I was trying to become someone.
What Remained
The tragic loss of Celta did not erase what she had given me. The confidence she awakened was still there somewhere. My work with the social work team at Georgia Regional Hospital had affirmed that psychiatric social work was the right path. Patients had talked to me. They had trusted me. I had felt useful and alive in that role.
But grief was pressing against everything.
At work, I could perform. With Martin, I could read poems. In the grief group, I could listen and speak. When I remembered Georgia Regional, I could still imagine a future where my own suffering might help me understand the suffering of others.
But inside my body, something was beginning to break.
I wanted to believe I was moving forward.
The truth was that I was unraveling.