All the Dangerous Things

by Stacy Willingham

I felt like I should have known—I should have had some kind of primal feeling that something was happening, something was wrong—but I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything.

But that’s the thing about grief: There is no manual for it. There is no checklist outlining the optimal way to move through it and move on.

“Nothin’ about grief makes sense.” He shook his head. “Not for any of us.”

That no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, we’re doing it all wrong. That every little thing is our fault; that we’re unfit, unworthy. That our shortcomings are the cause of every scream and tear and trembling lip.

I understand that there’s something even more unsettling than being alone in the dark. It’s realizing that you’re not really alone at all.

Cooking feels like a chore when it’s done out of necessity—not for the taste or presentation, but for survival alone—but when you throw another person into the mix, it turns into an activity, a pastime. Enjoyable, even. An intimacy in the mundane.

But it’s impossible to look our past straight in the eye, to see things with perfect clarity, so we have to rely on the memories.

It’s always so easy to blame the mother.

Nobody understands what it’s like to be locked inside the mind of a mother: the things you think that you aren’t supposed to; the beliefs that burrow themselves deep into your brain like a parasite, making you sick.

After all, the violence always comes to us in ways we could never expect: quickly, quietly. Masked as something else. Ben has always known that you don’t have to pull the trigger to get away with murder—sometimes, all you need to do is load the gun and let it go off on its own.

Nothing about grief makes sense: the things it has us do, the lies it leads us to believe.