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.

“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.”

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.

“Okay, you need to chill out,” said Sky. “That’s obviously your biggest problem.” And Ava couldn’t exactly argue with that diagnosis.

Was this what it felt like to have a younger sibling? Ava wondered. Feeling at once like their friend and their parent? Constantly wanting to give them both a lecture and a hug?

“But even all those comforts can’t hold my hand or kiss my head,” Ellis recalled one applicant’s words. “They can’t keep me from wondering what someone might say or do, if they were still here now. They can’t stop me from missing someone.” Grief and faith could coexist.

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.

Do you think maybe that’s what some of your patients felt, when they applied? That the Poppy Fields is this special place where they can be surrounded by other people who share their pain. Maybe the only place in the world where they wouldn’t feel so alone. Isn’t that what everybody wants, in the end? Just to feel a little less lonely?

“Yes, we should feel free to critique the Poppy Fields, like all institutions,” the commenter wrote. “But they’ve received *hundreds of thousands* of applicants. Shouldn’t we be more distressed by the fact that so many of our fellow humans are living in such deep despair? Think of how severely they must be hurting. Think of how badly we must be failing them. Maybe if we found a way to connect with each other more, to give each other a little more compassion and grace, to ask people what they need from us instead of always making assumptions, then maybe no one would feel the need to sleep there anymore. Maybe the Poppy Fields would simply run out of patients.”

Ava and Ellis weren’t quite at war, but they certainly weren’t at peace. Ellis had dug the moat between them, widening with every year, but it was Ava who’d finally filled it with water, making it nearly impossible to cross.

Sasha could finally see that every time she wallowed in all the what-ifs, every hour she focused on the what-might-have-beens, she was really just avoiding the thought of what actually, definitely was.

“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.”

But here’s the thing: They haven’t lost that love. They’ve lost the physical, the visible, the tangible layer of love, but not the love itself. The love itself endures. The love itself is baked into our memories. 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.

Memories without feelings are mere facts, cold and lifeless. It’s not enough just to say the names of our lost. The names must have power, must grab hold of our hearts, must remind us and teach us and inspire us.

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.