How to Make Friends with the Dark

by Kathleen Glasgow

this book is for the grievers this book is for the left behind this book is for every broken heart searching for a home

So much of me is from The Person Who Shall Not Be Named. So much of me is unknown.

I sit in our small life. Watching everybody else. A bug in a jar.

“Why can’t you ever just fucking leave me alone?”

A shiver suddenly breaks us apart. A sharp chill rushes through me, when just a second ago, I was warmer than I’d ever been. My teeth start chattering.

But in this room, no one moves. Everyone is silent. Even me, because I cannot breathe.

“I’m sorry. We tri—”

But she was already. It happens so. Really isn’t anything. No predicting something like.

“I’m so sorry. It’s his first…” She turns her palms up. I say, in a voice I don’t recognize as my own, because it’s something scratchy, and ghostly, and broken, “Mine too.”

The body on the table isn’t my mother, but he needs me to say it is. All of them do. And I hate them all for trying to make me say it.

while I can never move on, not now, and she will never, ever, ever be saved.

Your mom. Died.

I don’t understand what’s happening. Your mom can’t be alive one minute and then the next…not.

Lived. Not lives. My mother is past tense.

You blink and wonder where you are, why you are in the backseat of this car, cheek plastered to vinyl, and then the world splits open again, wider than you ever thought it could, sucking your breath away.

Now you remember, now you know, now you know everything, like why the movie memory stabbed so much.

Your friend looks so frightened. You think she is a little afraid of you now.

“I swear we’ll get through this.”

She’s crying hard. It kind of makes you angry, that she would cry. Like you should comfort her.

That’s what it would sound like right now, if I ate. Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk. Empty and hollow, because I’ve been carved out.

“You can text if you want. Friends are important right now.”

“Grief is a process your body and mind have to go through, Tiger. There isn’t a cure.

I don’t understand how things are keeping going when she has just stopped.

If I close my eyes and wish hard enough, will she come back? Is this some cruel, weird trick by the universe?

This cannot be fucking happening.

When I open my eyes, I’m in a strange room, and my heart jumps. Not my bed, not my blanket, not my clothes, not my walls, not my— And then it floods back over me. It wasn’t a bad dream after all. She’s still gone.

This isn’t a bad dream. I am really, really, really here, and she is really, really, really gone.

My heart surges with anger. How can I be okay? There isn’t any okay anymore.

“Tiger, a few of the parents have gotten together and we’re going to help out with the cost of the arrangements. So, we need you to take a look at these and let us know your thoughts.”

“Cremation, too, is a very accessible way to honor our…your loved one. The remains go home with you, and you may decide later how to honor your person. In this situation, cremation may be our best path.”

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.”

Before all this happened, I never knew trying not to cry would be actually, physically painful, but it is.

Do they just…sit in a refrigerator? Is that where my mother is at this very moment? Being gently chilled inside a wall somewhere, like a packet of ham or wedges of honeydew?

burned to bits, stuffed in a small box. It’s all a horror.

Truthfully? They can be as noisy as they want. Fine with me. Their noise just fills up all the empty space around me. Areas my sadness can leak.

If you ever get married, or go to prom, or graduate college, all that stuff that’s supposed to make a life? There will be an empty chair where your mom was supposed to be.

There will always be this emptiness inside you and beside you, where your mom is supposed to be, and only you will know the emptiness. Other people won’t be able to see it. They’ll see you, moving around the world, just like before. You’ll look alive on the outside but be dead on the inside, flicking your wings and watching everyone through the jar.

“I wish everyone would stop saying it will be okay. It won’t.”

“I’m sorry I’m crying so much,” and she pulls me against her.

“Welcome to the Big Suck. It’s going to be really bad.”

People keep asking, Do you need anything? They say, This is so awful. They say, She’s in a better place, and that makes me angry, because what does that make her place with me? Horrible?

She’s here, but she’s not. She looks like she’s sleeping, but in a very formal way.

“I didn’t pick the dress, just so you know,” I tell her. Nothing. “Open your eyes, Mommy,” I say softly. She doesn’t. “Why did you leave me?” No answer.

I put my head on her chest. It’s a surprise and not a surprise there’s no heartbeat inside her body.

Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. Please come back. Please. I crack into so many pieces they will never fit back together, not ever.

Death is kind of turning out to be a mean, weird bitch.

“People mourn in their own ways,

I shake my head to clear the memory. It just adds to my loneliness and I want to try and stay away from the black hole as much as I can.

and let her in. We hug, and I feel safe, for just a minute, like everything is

I wish I could ask somebody to hold me, or hug me, or tell me everything was going to be okay, and that I could trust them when they said it, but the only person I know who could do all that is gone, gone, gone.