She can't bear to know the details surrounding his death.
For her, loneliness and mortality are not merely conditions to be recalled but present afflictions to be endured, and she can only pray, "Give me what I can bear to know I felt".
Matt is a sensitive interviewer, and the secrets he gradually uncovers reveal more than he can bear to know about his old chums or, indeed, about the innocence of his own childhood.
"We bring a high degree of data and underlying prediction intelligence to bear, to know which users to go after in their native environment – be it phone or tablet, iOS or Android," says Ellis. "Customers pay us on more of a cost-per-action rather than a cost-per-install basis".
As with McGahern, Nelson broke the taboos around secrecy and denial and convincingly, painfully, showed how the abused self withholds from itself what it knows and yet cannot bear to know, to the point of breaking into pieces, very much prefiguring Eimear McBride's startling A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.
Raw, rockin' rhythm and blues was giving way to the softer sounds of high-school pop: the Teddy Bears' To Know Him Is to Love Him, Frankie Avalon's Venus, the Fleetwoods' Come Softly to Me and Mark Dinning's Teen Angel were topping the US charts.
Couldn't bear not to know what was going on at all times, that's the kind of baby you were, she says.
His enchantment with trash TV and the eccentric talents of a Cuban singer, Margarita Pracatan, seemed to sit oddly with someone who taught himself Russian because he "could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded" - but he says there is simply no aspect of cultural life that fails to fascinate him.
Born in 1906, he has lived through enough bear markets to know that investors will always blame others for losses, though they generally attribute profits to their own good sense.
Mountain bikes move too fast to allow a bear time to know you're coming, and you are liable to surprise a bear when speeding around a corner.
