A few years ago, there was a large sale on Amazon for a bunch of different Philip K. Dick books. I splurged and bought 12 books. At the time, I wasn’t well-versed in all of his work, but I knew how important he was in science fiction history. And, like I said, they were on a big sale.

One thing that I’ve wanted to do (and have started doing) is reading more “classic science fiction”. Earlier this year, I also began my dive into Isaac Asimov’s work (inspired by Apple TV+’s excellent Foundation series) with I, Robot.

I’m not here to give you a full review of a 50 year old book; however, I will say that if you like Dick’s style of surrealism and dystopian science fiction, you should read this book.

The main character, Jason Taverner, lives in a future version of the United States that has gone through a Second Civil War, and everyone lives in a police state now. Taverner is a genetically-enhanced singer and TV host, but he wakes up one day with no identification and nobody remembers who he is.

So how does a near-perfect celebrity navigate a world where being with your identification is a severe crime? By being just the worst. Over at AQ’s Reviews, they said it best: “Jason Taverner is not a loveable character.” I’m willing to go on the record and say you might be a little sociopathic if you do like Jason Taverner.

Plus, as SciFi Mind points out, Taverner isn’t even the true subject of this story. Through the book, Taverner “has a series of engaging conversations with people who show a much greater awareness than he does about love, grief, identity and reality – the true subjects of Flow My Tears”.

One of the characters that Jason meets is Ruth Rae with whom he has a deep conversation about love and grief.

Jason questions why love is “good” when the person you love can just leave. Then he loves someone else, and they leave, too. Ruth, who has been married a few dozen times, may be unlucky in marriage but has mastered what unconditional love is supposed to be and feel like.

Ruth said, “Love isn’t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That’s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is”— she paused, reflecting —“like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

(Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Kindle edition, pg 119)

Jason continues to argue with Ruth, essentially questioning why you should love at all if you aren’t guaranteed happiness all the time. Ruth tells Jason that grief is a “good feeling”, and he’s flabbergasted. She explains further: “And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it —grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost.” (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Kindle edition, pg 120)

With Jason still not understanding why he shouldn’t just avoid these feelings, Ruth delivers a few amazing lines on grief.

“But to grieve; it’s to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren’t constructed to go through such a thing; it’s too much — your body damn near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears.”

…

“Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go.”

(Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Kindle edition, pg 121)

I’m fortunate enough at this point in my life to have had few personal experiences with deep “feel it in your bones” grief. I hope my experiences remain few and far between, but I felt almost relief when I read these quotes.

You don’t measure your love for someone or something based on how much grief you feel. You grieve because you loved, and as Ruth said, “grief is the final outcome of love.”