The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

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 ...

And, for both, grief was also guilt. It was living with the question: How much was my fault? It was wondering what...

“This feels . . . bigger,” he said. “Heavier. Like there’s a little shard of darkness lodged inside me, and I can’t shake it out this time.”

that place . . . it’s not for people like you and me,” said Ray. “What the hell does that mean?” “I mean . . . we’re stronger than that. We can handle things. We’re the ones who other people call for help.”

there was simply no arguing with the logic of grief.

In life, there would always be loss, and the desire to sleep through the pain.

mean, obviously, whatever these people need to get through a tough time, they should totally do,” Sky reasoned. “But . . . I just can’t imagine missing out on two whole months of my life! I mean, none of us knows how much time we’ll have here, and . . . you can’t get those days back.”

I think a part of me is worried that sleeping is somehow . . . disrespectful to her? Like, maybe it’s important to feel the pain. All of it. Maybe that’s how we honor the people we’ve lost.

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.

these three powerful women, who gave every human a length of string that measured how long they would live. After their string got snipped, that was it.” Sky shook her head. “And it finally hit me that I was already, like, at least twenty percent of the way through my string. And this is the good part of the string. The part when I’m luckily still young and healthy and unattached, and I can do whatever I want. I guess I’m afraid of looking back on these years and feeling like I wasted that time. I’m afraid of missing out on life.”

When it comes to grief and loss, we don’t believe that “normal” exists.

Isn’t that what everybody wants, in the end? Just to feel a little less lonely?

No matter what people say about that place, that it’s evil or unnatural, that it’s magical or miraculous . . . there’s no real magic or miracles there. They can’t bring somebody back.”

“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.”

death anoints all sinners as saints.

You read any eulogy or obituary, and you’d think that anyone who ever died was perfect. When someone’s gone, it’s easy to forget all the flaws, all the fights. But . . . that flattens them. It makes them boring.

“This place is so much bigger than one family,”

Could it be possible that Ellis had built something so astonishing that it didn’t really matter if Ava felt like she’d lost her sister in the process? That what happened between Ellis and Ava, between Ellis and Granny Mae, were two losses more easily swallowed when weighed against all these thousands of souls?

Ellis forgot about how awful she had felt before she slept, forgot about the memory of the letters in the attic, forgot that she had wanted to be stronger for her sister.

we all grieve on our own. Our love is ours alone to give and ours alone to mourn, and in the end, at the Poppy Fields, everyone sleeps alone.

Love makes people do wild things, things they can’t understand, things they may have sworn they would never, ever do. So, were they ever to lose that love, I imagine they might do just about anything.

Love and loss, joy and pain, are two sides of the same coin, are they not? How could we ever banish one without endangering the other?

Does all our learned experience and information leave such traces in our bodies, remnants hidden and waiting until finally called out from within?

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.

poppies have a remarkable ability to grow in even extremely poor soil.

They’re often found in places where natural disasters or human behaviors have caused a massive disruption in the land. Their seeds wait in the soil, dormant, until they can emerge in the wake of catastrophe and help make way for other plants to return. Like they’ve been sleeping, just waiting to wake up and bring new life to the earth.

If something so spectacular can still blossom in even the most disturbed earth, then doesn’t that mean there’s hope for even the most battered hearts to heal?

You know that the world doesn’t always work well, that it often feels downright broken, but when the fiery sun melts into the calm waves of water and the clouds turn to peach and berry sorbet, you can’t help but feel that this one thing went right.

The Grieving Brain and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,