[...] I googled “boyfriend died” and turned up several personal essays in which the aching sadness produced by the accident or rare cancer was always unspeakable, taking years to get over. That I found these unrelatable seemed an indictment of both me and the essays. I will not deny that there was some guilty laughter. I’m not trying to be cavalier; I’m trying to say I may have been at times a little cavalier. I could find no example of the normal way to react to the death of a semi-serious boyfriend about whom you felt ambivalent at best even before you realized he was pretending to be a conspiracy theorist online. It’s not very rigorous to seek out and prize relatability, but it can calm you down, and like expensive beef jerky this was something I thought I’d earned.