The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

A long—long Sleep—A famous—Sleep— That makes no show for Morn— By Stretch of Limb—or stir of Lid— An independent One— —Emily Dickinson

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.

‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’”

How Ray hoped that all the clichés were true, that we see our full life before our eyes. That we’re able to look back and remember the beginning and the middle and the end, and that it doesn’t feel like a series of distinct events, but that it feels like a story, a journey, that now makes sense as a whole. Everything you learned and felt and experienced, all the people who shaped your life, all the people whose lives you shaped, the difference between the old world that once existed before you and the new world you now leave behind, the world that is irrevocably changed because you were a part of it.

“Losing someone . . . it’s not like a sickness or a temporary rough patch you’re trying to deal with. Even if you sleep for two months and wake up and feel less awful, the work isn’t done. This doesn’t end. This is the rest of your life. There’s no getting over, there’s just . . . getting on. Figuring out who you are now, because you sure as hell aren’t the same person as before. But maybe that doesn’t have to be all bad.”

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

The love itself is what slips across our cheeks when we cry, it’s what tugs at our lips when we smile. It’s the yearning pit in our stomach, the urge to make them proud. It’s the gratitude in knowing we were gifted something real.

Of special note are two insightful books on grief, Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s The Grieving Brain and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,

the informative webinars of Columbia University’s Center for Prolonged Grief.