Digging In

by Loretta Nyhan

At his service, everyone said he was still with me, but the truth was that not only was he gone, parts of me went with him. I missed them, too, and like Jesse, they weren’t coming back.

Everybody liked Frank, because Frank had that one quality no one could resist—he knew who he was and still liked himself.

I’d never been good with silence. I had to fill it.

I thought of something Big Frank said to me after Jesse died: You’re gonna have to deal with people who’ve never had to grieve before.

Like most artificially beautiful things, our lawn required constant maintenance.

Frank understood that I was both responsible and artistic, a combination he felt was rare.

“Pick a few things you don’t want to let slide, and let the rest sort itself out,” he said gently after one particularly rough day. “When someone leaves this world, everything else gets jostled because of the empty space. You’re gonna land in the wrong spot for a while. Sooner or later, you’ll find where you fit again.”

I shook the remaining cloudiness from my brain and tried to focus, but grief pulsed in my throat so violently it brought tears to my eyes.

Death was final, but grief wasn’t; it was a dirty street fighter who rose again and again even when I thought I had successfully knocked it to the ground.

Some things needed to be experienced to be learned.

I envied them, the joy they took from not caring, not giving even the tiniest bit of a shit. It looked exhilarating, their freedom, and I knew if I could somehow find the right door to open that I could be that free.

Like order, boring was safe. We could rely on it.

Grief made regular, run-of-the-mill worry completely irrational. The mind skipped to worst-case scenarios because of the realization that the worst could actually happen.

Plants did not merely grow tall; they grew wide, curious about their surroundings, eager to seek nourishment from anywhere they could get it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I had to prune them back or watch a branch snap and wilt. My garden was a patchwork of failures and successes. I loved it.

Unfortunately, memories tended to blur when they were no longer shared.

How did people become friends? They shared parts of their pasts, bit by bit, until the other person had something solid to hold on to.

“What was wrong was my reasons for it. I had no self-esteem. I wasn’t taking my own pleasure, I was giving it to other people so they might like me.

“But you didn’t use circumstance as an excuse to self-destruct.”

“Sometimes the brain takes a while to catch up with the heart.”

Sometimes I was struck by the permanence of the whole thing.

I’d pressed the “Pause” button on my life, and then lost the remote.

I was dating again, and what came with that was an avalanche of insecurities and second-guessing and forensic-scale analysis of every word or action.

Patience will be rewarded, the garden reminded me.

I knew it was simple panic, but my chest tightened from fear, the muscles bunching to protect my heart. I couldn’t catch my breath.

but in the stillness of late summer, it looked particularly lonely, like an old photograph.

As a general rule, I liked safe. Or, I used to. But then my safe life betrayed me.

like a manic pixie dream girl for people who actually had jobs and should know better.

“And if you didn’t know the person who died?” “Then you should ask for a good memory that best describes him or her. Let the grieving person have a moment with that person again.”

When life gives you tomatoes, you make tomato sauce.”

You can feel love in a touch, can you not? A look. A way of caring for someone.

I could replace my rage with pity.