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Do not stand at my grave and weep I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die. ~ Mary Elizabeth Frye
There are truths too painful to be spoken aloud. Some demons should be left to rot in the dark forever.
She walks away, leaving me staring pensively out into the rainy night, thinking about Moody Raincoat Guy, former local wonder boy turned mute, glowering diner patron with eyes like midnight at the bottom of a well. I wonder if his heart is full of ghosts too.
And despite its state of disrepair, this crumbling old inn feels like home. We’re both in ruins. We can keep each other company while repairs are made to our insides.
I’ve died a thousand deaths since the day I lost Cass. People say time heals all wounds, but that’s a lie. Grief is a chronic disease. The pain just keeps on coming.
His gaze is filled with unspeakable loneliness, and that naked antipathy that I don’t understand but that raises all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck and sends a charge like electricity over my skin. It’s the same feeling I had at the diner and in the backyard at the party. That sense of unwilling recognition. Of being seen by someone who doesn’t want to see.
Coop glances at my wedding ring, then looks back into my eyes. “Sure,” he says softly. “Death doesn’t end a relationship. Only a life.”
my mother always says an accident is just fate’s way of making sure you know you’re not the one in control.”
“But I’m luckier than most. That’s what I tell myself on the bad days: in a world full of temporary things, I have this love that will last forever. Even though Cass is gone, our love isn’t. And that’s how I live.”
I whisper, “I don’t want to forget him. I want to forget who I am without him.”
So I sit him down and tell him I’m worried. You know what his response was?” Afraid of what Coop’s going to tell me, I shake my head. “‘How can you remember someone you’ve never met?’”
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.
“By any…” I have to stop to force breath into my lungs. “By any chance, do you remember the date?” “Yeah. May seventeenth.” Everything starts to spin. Theo’s accident was exactly five years ago to the day that Cass died.
“Theo told me to watch out for you. Said to make sure you were okay. Somehow I don’t think you’re okay.” “Oh, Coop,” I say softly, touched by his concern. “I’m not even in the same universe as okay, but I’m surviving.”
“Love isn’t born of the flesh. It’s born of the spirit, and so can transcend the bonds of flesh, and life, and time. The poet Rumi said, ‘Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form.’”
The thing about depression is its weight. It’s so damn heavy. Every breath is a fight. Every step takes so much effort. It’s like trying to move through wet sand. It’s so much easier to lie down and let the sand fill your mouth and ears and eyes, to let it seep into your soul and obliterate all the nothingness.
A wise man recently told me that the thing that breaks you is the only thing that can put you back together. If we’re each other’s hammers, maybe we’re also each other’s glue.
“I don’t care if we’re crazy. You make me believe that all the things I stopped believing in might actually exist. You give me faith, Theo. Until I lost it, I had no idea how impossible it is to live without.”
A haiku, handwritten and left on my pillow. Isn’t it simple? Whatever we are, or not, There is only you.
All the lingering doubts about my sanity and the impossible puzzle my brain has pieced together are destroyed by finally hearing Theo speak. Because now I know why he stopped talking. His voice isn’t his own. It belongs to a man with sky-blue eyes and a smile like sunshine, whom I first met when I was six years old.
In a weak, scratchy voice, the words halting and almost unintelligible, he whispers, “It wasn’t enough.” “What? What do you mean?” I can barely speak, I’m crying so hard. My entire body is racked with sobs. When his lips move but no words come out, I lean closer, putting my ear near his mouth and begging him to say it again. On the faintest of exhalations, he does. “One lifetime wasn’t enough to love you.”
And I know with the same sixth sense that told me she’d be there at Cal’s Diner that night that I’ll love this woman forever. Whatever happens, she’s the true north my soul will always point to. I’ll love her in every one of my lives.
