Fuck theirbetterplace. She belonged here, among the living, not buried in eternal darkness at only forty. Her life had been ripped away—stolen from her, from me—by some drugged-up junkie chasing quick cash.
My father didn’t speak to anyone. He hadn’t uttered a word since we’d left the house that morning. He didn’t cry or show any nuance of emotion; he didn’t even flinch when the coffin hit the ground with that resounding thud. He wouldn’t even look at me. He hadn’t, not once, since we’d walked out of County General with our shadows trailing behind us like ghosts.
He just stood there beside me, rooted in place, eyes locked on where the casket had been like it owed him something. Like if he stared hard enough, long enough, she’d open her eyes, clear her throat, and apologize for dying.
We’d been strangers under the same roof for weeks. Co-inhabitants of grief. Not father and son. Not family. Not blood.
His grief was a locked room I wasn’t allowed into. Doors barred, windows boarded up, a ‘keep out’ sign scrawled across his silence. Mine was something else; a shipwreck still sinking. I was alive but submerged, lungs filling slowly, painfully, with something I couldn’t cough out.
Dad was the first to leave when the service was over.
He stepped forward, scooped up a handful of dirt, and tossed it onto her casket—like that could make up for all the ways he’d failed her since she died. Since before that, too.
Then he turned and walked away before anyone could react, the sound of his footsteps fading into the stunned silence he left behind.
For a moment, no one moved. Then as the crowd began to disperse, car doors slammed and tires crunched over gravel. Low voices murmured condolences that felt rehearsed, careful, empty.
That’s when it hit me.
They all got to leave.
They got to take their pressed black clothes, their polite grief, their crocodile tears and pitying looks and go back to lives that hadn’t shattered. Lives that would keep moving, keep breathing, like nothing irreversible had happened.
Whereas mine had screeched to a halt in a hospital hallway that smelled like antiseptic, sweat and dried blood. Mine had shattered beneath fluorescent lights and a flatline. Now here I was, silently bleeding out, while they got to go home and hugtheir mothers and loved ones and talk about a future I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
The sun stayed, bold and unforgiving, shining through a cloudless blue sky. It was a spotlight on my unraveling. The dirt beneath my feet looked too soft to hold her safely. Too alive. The wind stirred the trees, and I hated it for sounding like her laughter. Her rasping breath as she bent over, tears spilling down her cheeks. I hated it for sounding like anything but the deafening absence that wrapped itself around my ribs and squeezed.
She wasn’t in that box, not really, I knew that. That wasn’t my mother, just the shell of her. Her voice was gone, her smell, her warmth. Her Sunday pancakes and cardigan hugs. The way she’d stroke my hair and call me “baby” even when I towered over her, and my shoulders were broader than hers.
Even when I hadn’t said “I love you” the last time I saw her before she left for work. She still let me know she loved me unconditionally while I grunted in response.
That box was just wood and fabric filled with the absence of everything I loved. I didn’t say goodbye. There was no one left to say it to, but I was unable to leave.
I lingered long after everyone left.
A single seabird circled overhead; the ocean whispered in the distance, low and endless. She used to say the ocean calmed her, said it listened when no one else would. It was her safe place.
It was never gentle with me. It pulled at me now, like it knew something I didn’t. Like it was trying to speak to me in a language I couldn’t decipher or didn’t want to.
I felt nothing, and that nothing was starting to feel like safety. That if I stayed numb long enough, I wouldn’t have to feel anything at all. Not the weight of it all. Not my failure as a son or the way I was coming apart in silent pieces, too exhausted to acknowledge it as the breakdown it was.
My hands clenched into fists, and I shoved them into my coat pockets and stared at her grave until the edges of the world blurred and my eyes burned.
If I was being honest—I didn’t want to go home. Not because she wasn’t there, but because I was. I didn’t know how to exist in that house, in life, without her.
And the terrifying truth? I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The house didn’t feellike home when I returned after the bright blue sky had phased into the endless blackness of night. It felt like a mausoleum. A waiting room for the dead.
Dad was on the couch, a half-empty glass clutched between his fingers as he sat surrounded by a wall of silence. He didn't look my way as I walked in. Didn’t even acknowledge my existence. Some part of me—something small but desperate—wanted him to. I wanted him to talk to me, to ask me anything, to see me. Just once. Just this time.
But he didn’t. His red, glazed eyes blinked at nothing as he lifted the glass to his lips and swallowed down the bitter golden liquid.
He’d been like this since that day, sunk so deep into the cushions that he looked like he was being devoured by the furniture. Like grief had grown roots in his spine and was hollowing him out, slowly turning him into someone I didn’t recognize.
I passed him without a word, like a stranger moving through a place that wasn’t mine anymore. A place haunted by memories I couldn’t stand to look at. I didn’t bother taking off my muddy shoes, just headed upstairs, step after step, carrying out the onlyritual I had left. My penance for still being alive. I repeated it every day with some futile hope that things might be different this time, even though I knew it was impossible. Still, I hoped.
At the end of the hallway, their bedroom door waited. Shut, but not locked. Not that it ever was. The kind of shut that begged to be left alone. But I turned the knob, anyway.
