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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.
“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.”
Her path had been so well lit, and now she’d veered into total darkness. She hadn’t just lost Dean. She’d lost the person she thought she was and the person she’d planned to become.
nestling his head within the crook of her arm. The affection of an animal was always so pure and uncomplicated, Sasha thought, so unlike the love of a person. She watched as a few of her tears evaporated among the tiny curls of PJ’s fur.
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.
I remember learning about the Fates, 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.”
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.
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.”
“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.”
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. But the love itself is fragile, and it’s put at risk by the sleep.
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.
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?
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. After the First World War, they were one of the earliest flowers to begin growing again among the wreckage of the battlefields in Europe. 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. Poppies are a ruderal species, which means that they
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the absence of Johnny still feels like the air: sometimes you notice it more, like when the wind picks up or the sky feels particularly humid and heavy, but always, you’re at least somewhat aware of its presence. You’ll never exist without it.
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. And Sky only just realized now, after weeks of sending the pictures, that her three friends looking at all the photos might not actually be able to tell if the sun is setting or if it’s rising.
