But I also miss something else. Something I cannot shake.
The cascade of her. The enormous cascade her existence set into motion. All the people she would have helped, the sacrifices she would have made, the students she would have pushed past the point where they wanted to quit because she could see what they’d become before they could. All of it just stops. For nothing.
How many people are there creating that kind of cascade with their existence? Not many.
And Leonard Garza got what for stopping it? Half a second of pain. Maybe not even that. Maybe he was still blinking at me when it happened, still processing the face in his doorway, and then nothing.
She would be on this floor right now.
I stop at the water fountain and press the button and watch the arc of water. The arc is perfect, a clean parabola, and I watch it for longer than a person would normally watch a water fountain and I know I’m doing it and I can’t find the part of me that’s supposed to care.
Someone walks past behind me and I hear their footsteps slow for a moment, maybe wondering, and then speed up again, deciding it’s not their business.
I let go of the button. I walk.
The thought comes back like breathing.
He didn’t suffer.
My phone buzzes.
MANDATORY ATTENDANCE: Grief Counseling, 3:00 PM. Noncompliance may affect your position.
I read it twice. Grief counseling. Mandatory.
I put the phone back in my pocket. One of the nurses glances over. Chen, I think. Second year. She asks if I’m alright. I nod without looking at her.
Am I dissociating right now?
I must be.
I breathe out through my nose. Slowly.
Dissociation is a stress response. The prefrontal cortex deprioritizing sensory integration in favor of executive function. The brain doing triage, same as I do every day in this building, deciding what matters and what can wait. The trick is that it doesn’t know when to stop.
And what if I make mistakes and give someone a reason to realize I killed Leonard last night?
I need to calm down.
I look at the hallway ahead of me and count the ceiling tiles from here to the corner and I get nineteen and I count them again and I get nineteen again and that means my brain is working. Spatial processing intact. Numeracy intact. Fine motor control. I’m charting accurately. I’m speaking in complete sentences. I’m modulating my tone for patients without conscious effort.
I have to manage the grief counseling session at 3:00 where someone is going to sit across from me and look for cracks, and I have to give them a surface so smooth they see nothing but their own reflection. And I have to do it while some back corner of my mind keeps running the same useless arithmetic, weighing all the years of my mother’s life against half a second of Leonard Garza’s death and finding the math obscene.
I start walking. I straighten my coat. I check my watch.
I’m going to go through this.
I’m going to be exactly the person they all expect to see.
There is no other option for me.
At 2:15 I sign out and grab my coat. The drive across town takes twenty minutes longer than it should because of traffic, which gives me plenty of time to sit with the absurdity of a system that insists on processing emotions instead of addressing the failures that caused them.
The counseling center is housed inside a renovated church. A small old building some might call cozy, with pointed arch windows and a steeple that’s been repurposed into an office.
I park, cross the uneven walkway, and follow a volunteer down a narrow hallway to a dimly lit room where chairs are arranged in a circle.
Group therapy.
