Someone Else's Bucket List

by Amy T. Matthews

She’d thought watching summer flitter by had been difficult, but winter was looking to be infinitely worse. It was like being buried alive.

It never occurred to her that she wouldn’t win. Not until the second course of chemo.

She assumed it was what all old women did. Had sisters who plonked themselves at your kitchen table and annoyed you, from the cradle to the grave.

Chemo had taught Bree that fear was an emotional black hole. It had gravity so dense it not only pulled you in, it pulled you inside out. It was best to avoid it. To deny it. To chart a course in the opposite direction.

Until Bree got sick, Jodie hadn’t realized how painful love was. It stung. Like lemon juice poured on an open wound. But worse. It wasn’t pink and pleasant; it was bloodred and visceral. Fearful.

Grief was like weather: it had seasons and moods, and it could always take a turn for the

worse. Today had started with lowering clouds of gloom and the rainy smell of despair; there had been razor-sharp, heart-hurting cold; then a bitter wind had blown in, churning the flat gray sky into a stormy sea of misery; and now there was driving, sheeting, pelleting sleet. The kind that flayed the skin off your bones.

That was the thing about death, it put someone out of reach forever. You could never, ever ask them a question, ever again.

Jodie felt the airless suck of grief again, like a riptide pulling her from shore. Bree should be the one here finishing the list; she should be the one falling in love. Jodie should be the one . . .

Jodie glanced up at the foggy sky. Bree? Snow spiraled down.

Grief was a bitch. It screwed everything up.

Fear is just a part of life.