The Dead Romantics

by Ashley Poston

“Your grandma—my mother—told me once that the wind is just the breath of everyone who came before us. All the people who’ve passed on, all the ones who’ve taken a breath—” And he took a breath himself, loud and dramatic, and exhaled. “They’re still in the wind. And they’ll always be in the wind, singing. Until the wind is gone. Do you hear them?”

Because music was a heartbeat, too, in its own way, and death wasn’t a send-off without some good tunes.

I’d always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn’t the absence of everything you lost—it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.

I was foolish, and I was only going to hurt myself, because if I knew anything about death, the goodbyes were harder with ghosts than corpses.

Because loneliness was the kind of ghost that haunted you long after you were dead. It stood over your plot in the cemetery where a lone name sat carved in marble. It sat with your urn. It was the wind that carried your ashes when no one claimed your body.

The evening was so quiet, I could hear the wind creak through the old house. The dead singing.

I just like love stories, I guess. I like the way they paint the world in this Technicolor dreamland, where the only rule you have to follow is a happily ever after. And I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing after that high.”

“There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”

“The thing is, Heather,” I went on, “I believe people. Even if it’s weird, even if it doesn’t make sense, I want to believe them. I want to see the good in them. I give my heart to everyone I meet and I put it in everything I do. And sometimes it hurts—often it hurts, actually . . .” And I glanced back to Ben, wishing I had taken that moment on the porch and trapped it in a jar. “I can’t ever control how someone else treats me, but I can control how I choose to live and how I choose to treat others. And I’d worried about what other people thought and what other people wanted from me for years because I actually thought it mattered.”

I began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe. I still believed in that—I saw it in my parents, in my siblings, in Rose’s unabashed one-night stands looking for some peace. It was why I kept searching for it, heartbreak after heartbreak. It wasn’t because I needed to find out that love existed—of course it did—but it was the hope that I’d find it. That I was an exception to a rule I’d made up in my head. Love wasn’t a whisper in the quiet night. It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.

“I think the worst part is that Lee thought my childhood was something sad and lonely. And maybe sometimes it was. And it wasn’t always great—but god, Ben, it was good. It was broken a little, and banged up, but it was good.” I pulled open the drawer beneath the stereo to show Ben the CDs we had, the ones Dad played. “It was so good.”

Because Dad collected songs and danced Mom around the parlor—and together they taught us how to say goodbye. They taught us a lot of things that most kids rarely even thought of. They taught us how to grieve with widows, and how to console young kids who didn’t quite know death yet.

They gave us the tools to figure out what to do when they were gone.

I undid my hair from its tight bun and shook it out, because the wake was over, and began to sing along to the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Dad used to turn up the stereo as loud as it would go, so loud I was sure the corpses rattled in the basement, and take Mom by the hand, mouthing the words, and she’d laugh as they danced through parlors so accustomed to death, and they looked like home. They were home. This was home.

Because Dad left us things—little things—so that we wouldn’t be alone. So Mom wouldn’t be alone. So he could still be with us, even if just in the melody of a song. Any song. Every song. Not just the Foundations, or Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi or Fleetwood Mac or Earth, Wind & Fire or Taylor Swift. Whatever song, whatever made us feel alive. Carver grabbed his partner by the hand, and pulled him into the hall to dance. The good goodbyes.

I always thought the CD was meant for the people laid up in coffins, with floral arrangements and bouquets and guest books—and maybe it was. But maybe it was for the living, too. To keep us moving forward. Ben watched with a baffled look, so misplaced in a funeral home filled with light and sound, and before I could stop myself I reached out to try to take his hand, to get him to dance with us—...

That worth wasn’t dependent on someone else’s love for you, or your usefulness, or what you could do for them.

“Everything dies, buttercup,” he once said as we sat on the front porch, watching a storm roll in. Carver was toddling in his play pool, and Alice was gurgling on his knee. “That’s a fact. But you wanna know a secret?” And I had leaned in, so sure it was a cure for death, a way to bat it away— “Everything that dies never really goes. In little ways, it all stays.”

Not in the horrific way Lee wrote it. Not with moaning ghosts and terrifying poltergeists and living dead, but in the way the sun came back around again, the way flowers browned and became dirt and new seeds bloomed the next spring. Everything died, but pieces of it remained. Dad was in the wind because he breathed the same air that I breathed. Dad was a mark in history because he existed. He was part of my future because I still carried on. I carried him with me. This house carried him. This town.

He hoped I asked for help because asking was not a weakness—but a strength. He hoped that I would ask more often, because I would be surprised by who would come into my life if I let them.

endings were just new beginnings.

Life happened in old funeral homes, too.

I read because I want to be held. Not like, literally, by a book. (That’d be weird.) But metaphorically. I want to sink into a novel. I want to be romanced by the possibility of sunsets too pretty to describe and kisses that you feel all the way in your toes and love stories too wide and wild for you to ever feel alone.

Florence’s dad said that the people we love are in the wind, and I believe it. I think that the people we love can be in the pages of books, too. I hope you find yourself in a book someday. And I hope that book lives forever.