The Poppy Fields

by Nikki Erlick

They carry the pain that comes for us all, the weight ultimately thrust upon everyone.

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.

essentially erase the patients’ feelings, leaving them with an overall sense of numbness or impartiality toward the person lost.

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.”

“My friends asked me how I could possibly let myself sleep for such a long time—could I really allow the world to just move on without me? They had no idea that the world was already moving on without me. And that’s precisely why I wanted to sleep.”

“Pelorus Jack was a dolphin in nineteenth-century New Zealand who spent more than twenty years swimming alongside ships when they were coming or going from a particularly rough passage, near the Pelorus Sound. Almost like he was guiding them, or at least accompanying them on their way in and out of danger.”

This fire was blinding, disorienting, suffocating. This fire was a lot like grief.

If the Poppy Fields had failed Johnny as a patient, then maybe Ray hadn’t failed him as a brother.

It was the kind of moment that one usually looks back on, having failed to fully appreciate it until viewed in retrospect: Oh, yes, that was the moment my life changed. If only I’d realized it then.

her perpetual desire to be in control much greater than her taste for booze.

Life that has found a way to survive, even when the world makes it damn near impossible.

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

“Some days are gonna hurt more than others,” said Donna. “You did good, just getting yourself this far. But you’ve still got a road ahead of you, and it’s long and windy as hell, with switchbacks and curves that’ll make it feel like you don’t know if you’re coming or going. So, you just drive it as fast or as slow as you need, don’t give a damn what other folks think . . . Just don’t stop driving, okay?”

Ellis had already come to believe that 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 changes us. It strengthens us, and dents us, and lifts us, and guides us. If we sleep, if we suffer the side effect, if we’re no longer shaped by the people we love . . . who are we?