A Thousand Letters

I took a sharp breath, chest heaving. "Don’t tell me about life being hard. Don’t tell me that with your privileged life that you have any idea what it means for life to be hard. This? This is nothing. We didn’t lose Dad to an IED. We didn’t see him shot or his body shredded from a mortar. I know life is hard. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard the song of the dying. I’ve been standing up and living it since I left home."

She took a deep breath, eyes shining, arms folded across her chest. "Then why couldn’t you do this?"

"I don’t know!" I yelled, hands fisted. "It’s too much, too close. I’m sorry. I told you I’m sorry last night, and I’ll keep saying it. I don’t know what else you want from me. I don’t know what else to do."

"Well, I told you last night that you’ve done enough." She blew past me to the peg where her coat hung. "We’re going to be late," she said in lieu of a request or a demand.

I followed my sisters out in silence, the wall between us impenetrable.

There was nothing else I could say, and frustration mingled with my anger over the fact. We should have been hanging on to each other for this. I should have been there yesterday. I should have done a lot of things, but I didn’t, and here we were, the three of us riding to the cemetery like silent islands, disconnected.

The funeral director met our cab and escorted us to the plot. Everything was covered in snow except the dark slash of his grave, dug just next to my mother’s. Her name called to me from the marble slab, topped with flowers to match the ones on Dad’s coffin. It rested on a platform with a lowering mechanism, surrounded by plastic turf, and as we approached, I heard music playing softly from somewhere, Chopin’s Nocturnes.

We were given single flowers and we filed to the coffin to lay them on the glossy surface. First Sadie, hand pressed to her lips and shoulders shaking gently. Then Sophie, her tears falling silently, streaking her cheeks. And finally me, my heart twisted and aching in my chest. I set my flower next to my sisters’ before pressing my palm to the dark wood, imagining him on the other side, hearing him whisper to me to let him go. But I didn’t know how, didn’t know if I could.

I didn’t want to step away. If the seconds had ticked past slowly before, when he was still alive, the moments we were in were the final, the last, and they stretched on endlessly. It was very nearly done; when I left his side, he would be gone forever. I wanted to scream, to cry, to fight for him. But there was nothing left to fight for, because he had left us with an empty vessel, lying on a satin pillow in a box we would place in the ground and cover with earth. It was insane, a ridiculous, ludicrous tradition, meaningless because it wouldn’t help us, and he didn’t care anymore what happened to him. We would never move on, we would never forget, and we would never forgive the universe or God or ourselves for the loss.

But there was nothing left to be done. So I said goodbye, sent my heart out of myself, into the air, and I stepped back, not taking my eyes off the coffin as I took my place next to my sisters.

Our eyes were all forward, and no words were spoken, the gentle piano music slipping over us as the coffin began to lower slowly, inching down silently, and my tears fell as he disappeared into the earth, taking my soul with him.

Sophie sobbed, a strangled sound, her body wavering just before her knees gave out. I caught her, held her as she clung to me, her eyes on the hole in the ground, her body wracking with sob after sob, but after a moment, she pushed me away, shaking her head. She didn’t want my comfort, not even now, and I took my place by her side again, wounded and alone.

We stood at the edge looking down, and I felt the loss, felt the quiet absence of him acutely, as if my heart had been waiting for the moment to break entirely. I didn’t know how long we waited here, but with the nod of the director, the workers came, rolling up the turf, disassembling the machine that had placed him where he’d rest forever. None of us seemed to be willing or able to move as Chopin played on and the small bulldozer pulled up. The director looked to me for approval, and I gave it to him with the smallest of nods.

We stepped back as the machine approached with a load of dirt, tipping its maw, the earth falling down to hit the lid of the coffin with a hollow thump. My sisters jumped from the shock of the noise, Sadie reaching for Sophie, Sophie clutching Sadie, and me, separate, solitary.

It was all I could take. But I endured it through the end, which was really no end, only the limit of what we could take. We turned our backs on the gravesite and walked away to the sounds of a roaring machine on the wings of Chopin, through the winding path of the cemetery to the street, where I hailed a cab.

The girls slipped inside, but I waited there on the curb, my body shaking with mounting hysteria. The mask was gone, the support that had barely been holding me up fallen, leaving me exposed.

"You’re leaving us again," Sophie said, the plea rough, thorny and coarse.

"I’ll be home later." I didn’t wait for an answer before closing the door.

She trained her eyes forward, her jaw set and lips flat as the cab pulled away. But nothing I could say would absolve me. I needed to think, needed to get away, needed to understand. I had nothing left to give to her or to anyone.

I was in full uniform, and the eyes of passersby followed me, marking me, judging my behavior, but I couldn’t stop moving. I was lost, aimless, frantically digging through my thoughts for the bottom, but there was no bottom, no end.

I had lost everything.

And I needed to know why.

Elliot

The doorbell rang in the quiet house — everyone was gone, busy at work or shopping, and the kids in school, leaving me alone, which was where I wanted to be.

The day had been spent transferring my grief onto paper, trying not to think about Rick or Sophie or Wade, trying not to think about the cemetery and smell of wet earth. And when the doorbell rang, when the sound marred the silence, I should have known who it would be.