recursive approaches to grief
Selena gets strange, the times she tells me about Noah. I, of course, didn’t know him very well — I'm shocked beyond measure she seemed to. Quiet and reclusive with a mouth that rarely smiled, someone you exchanged pleasantries with but never stopped to actually talk to. I don’t even think I know what really happened, although she’s never going to say. She’s just going to pick at the frayed green edges of her favorite comforter and laugh too often and too loudly about it. Never get to the end. Rinse and repeat, but never the part that hurts the most.
It’s almost impressive.
“Do you have a minute? I need to talk about it.” That’s all she has to say to get me sitting cross-legged on her linoleum floors, squinting against the morning light that streams in from the southside window. There is something businesslike about her approach to her own grief. She carves it into her calendar, refuses to let it spill out of the times allotted. As soon as the clock strikes ten, she’s rehashing it, and once it hits ten-thirty, she’ll seal it away once again.
It’s all details with her, leading up to but never quite reaching the end of the story. That’s the rule. She can’t tell the end of the story, or it becomes too real. “Picture this,” she’s told you, and tells you again now. “You’re just in from lunch, and you’ve just settled your students in for silent reading time. The lights are off, but the blinds are open, and you’re sitting back in your awful, creaky swivel chair and enjoying the quiet. It was probably a mistake to set the timer on your phone, but, hey. Hindsight’s 20/20, right? You didn’t know you’d get that text. You didn’t know they’d break it to you like that.
“‘Noah’s dead.’ That’s it.” She exhales, shaky. “Points for brevity, I guess.”
She never finishes the story. It’s all dusty tile floors and the squeak of plastic desks and the sound of muffled sobs, because she is in a room full of ten-year-olds and they can’t possibly see her like this.
“It gets fuzzy when I think about it now. The details, you know? Was I holding a red marker or an orange one when I got the news? Was it raining, or am I misremembering my heartbeat in my ears? One of my girls came and comforted me. Was it Ellie or Juliet?” She laughs, although I don’t know if the sound qualifies. It’s too frail, clashing against the stubborn lightness of her tone when she adds, conspiratorially, “Sometimes I wonder whether he’s actually dead.”
That’s new. I try to tamp down my expression. Maybe there’s a sudden jump in my brows or twist to my mouth that belies my disbelief all the same. How could you have something cut you so deeply only to doubt it ever happened? Is this another of her jokes? Maybe I’m misremembering, or she’s playing a game with me. Selena’s confessed that she says things just to get a reaction, sometimes. Even now, there’s a little grin ghosting across her face, filled to the brim with something coiled and watchful.
But is it playfulness I see there, or genuine distress?
(Had endless grieving really worn her loss into delusion?)
He is, Selena, is what I could say. He’s gone. It’s been years. But she’s talking, and her knuckles are doing that self-soothing tap-tap that they do against the headboard, and there’s a new tremor to her voice that sews my mouth shut.
“Maybe he’s still out there,” Selena tells me. “Maybe I imagined it, and he just doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. I think I could handle that. But would it kill him to drop me a line?”
Her voice is taut and fathomless, and it fractures with something I cannot begin to name.
Clutching her pillow with knuckles bone-white and a vulnerable shine in her eyes, Selena tosses her head back and laughs.