What Happened to the Bennetts

by Lisa Scottoline

carrying his hurts around like a backpack.

I knew we could not all fall to pieces at the same time. I was Daddy.

I wanted her to be whatever she wanted to be. I wanted her to be alive. I had taken alive for granted.

All the markers of my life, still in place. Except everything had changed.

My daughter surrounded us, but was absent. It was a family room without the family.

With effort, I put on a smile, like I’d put on a tie for work.

“That’s grief, man. It gets in you. Your body carries it. It’s embedded.”

I kept going after, I thought I was fine. I wasn’t. My body knew. I slowed down.

Tears came to my eyes, and grief ambushed me, as if it had been lying in wait, all along.

It was important to go on, but impossible to go on.

I wondered if memories were good things, if they came embedded in grief,

Death was everywhere, in the present, in the past, in the future. I wondered why we bothered with time at all.

then realized I was never not thinking of Allison. Maybe that was the way it was going to be from now on. Maybe that was the way I could keep her with me. Maybe there would come a time when it didn’t make me feel broken,

My chest felt full and tight, both at once. My heart was broken, but broken open. I hurt so much, but I felt so much, too. I felt everything more than I had before. I gave myself over—to what, I didn’t know. To whatever happened next.