The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

“Grief is an individual journey. Everyone navigates it differently. When determining if an applicant is a good candidate for our sleep, we do not look at the pain itself. We look at the person who is feeling it.”

we often see impressions of the people we’ve lost in even the smallest and strangest of details in others.

“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.”

But I’ve learned that the heart is a very big place, with room for many loves inside. And when one of those loves is lost, sometimes it’s too much to ask all the other loves to make up for the one that’s missing. The heart needs time to reassemble itself,

to learn how to beat again when a part of it is gone.

I just had to think . . . if it hurts this much now,” Donna said, “then I must have been pretty darn lucky.”

“And some of us just need to be surrounded by the people we love,” she said, “and feel that they love us back.”

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.