At least the ones I don’t carry with me in my soul.
2
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DO THIS?
In The Stars by Benson Boone
Natalie
“Please stop apologizing,”Bella says as we walk to Nick’s resting place. How did I forget? I should be ashamed of myself. I knew Nick my entire life, and he was mine for half of it.
“I am sorry, and it’s?—”
“It's important for adults to apologize, I know,” she interrupts, grabbing the flowers from my hand and walking ahead of me as I carry her sister on my hip.
Vero fell asleep on the way here, and I can’t blame her. At three, her life is full of therapies and never-ending pushing her body to the limit in the name of being where she needs to be developmentally. I understand the benefits of early intervention, but it doesn’t negate the fact that it’s exhausting for an adult, let alone a kid.
Bella’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes as she walks backwards, nearing Nick’s grave. “I know, okay? We get it. But you overdo it sometimes. You’re human. You forget. Forgive yourself.” Shespins in a circle, her dress swirling with her as it did the first time we came here. The first time she had to come say goodbye to her father, six feet underground.
It hits me like a thousand pounds to the chest. So young and already so close to loss.
“Life’s clearly too short, Mom. Give yourself some grace.” Sometimes, I forget who the adult is in this relationship, and the pain hits even harder.
She was so young when her world came crumbling down, cracking into a million pieces and burying both her parents under the rubble. Her dad never to be seen again, and the mother she used to know replaced by a shell of a human.
I’m the shell.
The impostor.
She falls to her knees in front of her dad’s grave as I sit on the worn bench facing it, cradling a little girl who never knew her dad or a mother who wasn’t tainted by grief. This bench stands far back enough to allow Bella space to talk to her father in private. It’s like I blinked, and she’s changing right in front of my eyes, so grown but still so little.
She’s full of hope and dreams and feelings, full of wants, needs, joy, sorrow. She’s vocal about them, too, letting everyone who would listen know. Unfortunately, I can’t protect her from everything.
I try.
I really do. But in the end, there was nothing we could do to protect her from knowing this pain.
Bella laughs with her eyes closed, sitting on the ground, her dark hair spilling over our last name on the silver gravestone.
Nick Bradshaw.
Dad & Husband. Son. Coach. Teacher. Friend.
Gone too soon.
Loved Forever.
1996-2024
We honor victims best by preventing the next tragedy.
His name is next to the things that were important to him in the exact order he would have wanted them.“I’m a father and a husband first; they weigh the same in my eyes.”And he was the best at both.
His relationship with Bella was stellar, and it has carried through even now, years later. This moment—our girl, laughing and talking to her father as if it hasn’t been years since he came home.
She opens her big blue eyes, just like his, and smiles at me, nodding. I wonder sometimes if she can talk to ghosts, if she can communicate with him. I wonder if he tells her to reassure me he’s fine, that we will be okay.
It’s like he’s gone, but a piece of his steadfast heart and his entire legacy is living on through his daughter. His fourteen-year-old daughter, who gives me more peace and hope than anything else.
