The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

Because they have each been told, over and over, that the only way out of a hardship is through. But nobody ever told them that they had to stay awake.

No matter how small of a city she lived in, no matter how quiet a life she led, Ava never felt bored or trapped or ignorant. She could travel the globe or travel through history, feel love or hate or envy or hope, any day she pleased, any time she checked out a new book.

“Grief. The moment when you realize that your world and the world are entirely separate. When your world has come to a grinding halt, when you’re drowning and flailing about, and the world just rolls on without you.”

After the funeral, Sasha felt aimless. She drifted through the blurry, borderless days. Days of sobbing and sweatpants. Days when even eating a full meal felt like a ruthless betrayal, now that Dean was no longer able to savor his favorite foods. And the days turned into weeks, those first few weeks of losing Dean. She almost thought about them as the weeks after losing Dean, but it wasn’t really such a clean break. It was a prolonged act of losing him, of coming to accept it as immutable truth. Of canceling plans bit by bit, rewinding all the tapes of their future she’d been playing inside her head. She felt like her whole body had been hollowed out, as empty as the years to come. Sasha had lost her lover, and she’d lost all the steps ahead. The vows exchanged in the same church where her parents had been wed. The house in the suburbs they’d decorate together. The children and grandchildren they’d raise and love. The debates over where to retire. Her path had been so well lit, and now she’d veered into total darkness.

She’d lost the person she thought she was and the person she’d planned to become.

In those early weeks, Sasha remembered, all she really did was breathe. The frightening, dizzying spurts of shallow, rapid, can’t-stop breathing, when all she could do was try to calm herself down by taking slower, deeper breaths. The attacks would come in waves, the ocean of overwhelm pulling her out, and then she would try to reel herself in, thinking only of her breath. Until the ocean pulled her out again, and she...

During those weeks when it felt like all she did was breathe, she couldn’t help but think of Lamaze class, though she’d never been pregnant herself. How fitting, Sasha thought, that birth and death seemed to share this physical link. How the same bodily techniques used to bring a new life into the world were also called upon to bid another life farewell. And it didn’t really matter how many courses you took, or books you read, or people you consulted, there was no w...

The thing about grief is that it’s never just grief. For Sasha, grief was also fear. Fear that she might never love again, fear of her unknown future. For Ray, grief was also anger. Anger at the way he’d lost his brother, at the place he blamed for taking him. And, for both, grief was also guilt. It was living with the question: How much was my fault? It was wondering what you could have done differently.

This was the other side of love. This was the aftermath, the cost, the opposite end of the bargain. This was the dirty, damp confetti and trampled flower petals, stamped into the muddy ground and tossed about by the wind, long after the parade had ended. This was the sad, lonely echo in the hall, now that the dance was over. Here, in this room, was grief. But grief was love in its second shape.