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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.
A tornado, like a meteor, annihilates the land it touches. It flips and spins and turns homes inside out and upside down. It has the power to destroy lives at random, immediately and indiscriminately.
Ava knew that people would always form their opinions of small towns, especially in her part of the country, but she took pride in the fact that even the tiniest of towns around where she grew up—compact communities with little more than a grocery, a gas station, and a church—often had a public library, too. It was one of the essentials, like food and fuel, the nourishment of body and mind and soul. No matter how small of a city she lived in, no matter how quiet a life she led, Ava never felt bored or trapped or ignorant. She could travel the globe or travel through history, feel love or hate
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“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.”
She’d lost the person she thought she was and the person she’d planned to become.
During those weeks when it felt like all she did was breathe, she couldn’t help but think of Lamaze class, though she’d never been pregnant herself. How fitting, Sasha thought, that birth and death seemed to share this physical link. How the same bodily techniques used to bring a new life into the world were also called upon to bid another life farewell. And it didn’t really matter how many courses you took, or books you read, or people you consulted, there was no way to truly prepare for either, she knew. They would always feel thrust upon you. They would always take your breath away.
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.
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.
‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’”
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.”
“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.”
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.
