When She Returned

by Lucinda Berry

My memories of Mom were more of a feeling—a time in space, etched into me in a way that no amount of time could erase. But they were just pieces. Very small ones.

One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliché, because the intensity of the loss was too big.

James had never been my fairy-tale husband—Scott was. I’d never told him that, though, because how did you bring something like that up? Hey, by the way, I love you more than I did my first husband? I could never say that to him because he wouldn’t be able to say it back, and I’d always been okay with that, but what would happen now?

Traumatic grief was groundless, a free fall into space. Unless you’d been there before, you couldn’t understand what it felt like.

I knew that feeling. The pain of being alive when someone you loved dearly was gone. It hadn’t lessened.

but it seemed wrong to talk about football games and homecoming when there were so many other important things going on.