As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

I think that grief is such a strange guest, making its home in a person like it’s a new thing that no one has ever experienced before.

Empty school desks are all around me as the morning bell rings. It’s been only five days since the parade, and the influenza that was at the army bases is everywhere now. At first, there were just a few sick people here and there. But by the third day every classroom was missing someone.

“The school and church cafeterias have been turned into soup kitchens, and volunteers are making food for people who are too sick to cook their own meals,” one of the ladies said.

Most people have masks on; a few don’t. Some stores we pass are open; some aren’t. Some doors have red-lettered placards that read INFLUENZA tacked to them—which means there is flu inside—some don’t. Some doors have crepe banners tacked to them—white if a child died, black if it was an adult, and gray if it was an old person whom the flu had killed—and some don’t.

Evie says I am wrong about that. She says the flu wanted to make barbarians of us, to have us think life is not precious and the dead are not worthy of our kindest care. Our humanity is what made what happened to us so terrible. Without it, nothing matters. Nothing is awful. But nothing is amazing, either.

don’t think the return of your humanity means you forget what broke your heart.

Home isn’t a place where everything stays the same; it’s a place where you are safe and loved despite nothing staying the same. Change always happens. Always.

We were all wounded inside where no one could see. None of us had survived the last year unscathed.

She said it’s not how short or long an experience is; it’s the depth to which it touches the core of who you are that matters.

Millions upon millions of people had died around the globe from the flu, far more than in the war itself. The simple reclaiming of delight and goodness and joy had been a staggering endeavor that took place inside our minds, in the tangles of neurons that have always distinguished us from brutes and beasts. Our injuries were hidden deep within our psyches. That was where we needed the balm that would heal us.

My weaker sex is still believed by most to be highly susceptible to fits and hysteria. I, being a woman, had better odds of becoming a future mental patient than of becoming a psychiatrist.