`An Uncomfortably Uncomplaining Monolith'

L.E. Sissman, “A Little Night Music: The Curvature of the Earth,” Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s (1975):

“My first reaction, an almost entirely unconscious one, was to clamp a tight lid of security down on overt expressions of these feelings. It seemed that the only way to deal with this crisis—different in degree but perhaps not, after all, in kind from others I had had to deal with—was to negate it, to pretend to myself and everybody else that, though it had happened to me, it couldn’t happen to me. This ersatz stoicism, grafted on from the outside after the fact, worked fine. It took my wife and friends in, not to mention me. I soon convinced myself that que será, será, and to hell with it. My wife found me an uncomfortably uncomplaining monolith. The doctors took me for some unheard-of man of steel. And all the time I was simply denying the enormous, realistic likelihood of an untimely (whatever that means) death.”