“I don’t really have time to cry.”
“That’s not a scheduling problem, sweetheart.”
I held still, managing my expression, my breathing, my posture. Making sure none of it showed. Because it was the wrong story and the right one. I wasn’t a widow with three kids. But I was the oldest. A lot fell to me. I’d managed the affairs of two deaths, except one didn’t comewith a body, just a porch and a door that stayed shut. I was the one everybody fell apart to. I had no time. There was no version of any week where I had time. I understood her. Felt it.
I cleared my throat quietly and found a water stain on a ceiling tile and put my eyes on it and ran four-six breathing without moving anything anyone could see.
Candace’s gaze came up off the woman and moved across the circle and found me, the support man in the back who wasn’t a part of any of this, and held a second too long. She didn’t say a word. But I felt her see it.
I looked away until she moved on. A few others shared and I heard them through water. As the circle moved on, I tried to focus on being supportive and present. But those stories kept hitting me in places I didn’t expect. The rest of the session passed in a blur. Alyssa never fully shared, but she moved easily into conversations. I caught her glancing at me several times.
At the end Candace folded her hands. “Before we go. Here’s something to carry this week. One thing toward the person you’ve lost. Doesn’t have to be big. Write them a letter. Say their name out loud in an empty room. Cook the thing they loved. Or go sit with them, if there’s a place you can go.” Her eyes moved around the circle. “One small thing where you stop managing the grief and let them be missed. We’ll talk about it next time.”
“Thank you for coming,”Alyssa said when we were finally walking to my car.
“Of course. How do you feel?”
“Good. Really. Lighter, honestly.” I could tell that she was. Going in she seemed nervous and apprehensive. An hour of other people’s worst days, and she’d come out of it loosened, while I’d come out affected in a way I didn’t anticipate.
Something sat wrong in me the whole walk to the car. I knew what the grief was, where it had come from, what had stirred it. This was a different thing. Something off about the shape of the night, that didn’t line up.
“You didn’t really talk in there,” I said instead.
She glanced up. “You don’t have to talk at the first one. Candace even said it. I just wanted to be in the room. Get a feel for it.”
I nodded. “Do you need me next week?” Part of me… most of me… wanted her to say no.
She hesitated, rubbed her lips together again. “I’d like that. If you don’t mind.”
“I’ll check my calendar.”
I didn’t sleepright that night, or the nights after. For years I’d wake up at five without an alarm. Now I lay there until past six, sometimes seven, thick-headed and slow. My runs dragged. I’d lose the plot in a meeting and have to ask someone to say it again.
I started having dreams about my mother. Calling for me somewhere in my house, and me unable to find the room she was in. I’d wake up gasping, feeling like it was the day she’d died, like I was that nineteen-year-old, and it was all happening again.
The worst part was how exposed I felt. Like sitting in that circle had stripped away something essential I needed to function. I felt like I was falling apart and I knew exactly why. I’d sat half a step outside a circle in a church basement and let something knock loose, and now it was rolling around inside me breaking things I needed.
And then there was Alyssa. Who was fine. If anything, better than fine. Humming in my kitchen, reaching for me like nothing in the world was wrong. She’d gone into that room and gotten whatever a person goes there to get and come out clean. I’d gone into that roomfor her, and come out skinned.
I didn’t have a name for it for a day or two. Then I did. Resentment. Aimed at the one person who had never once earned it from me. And instead of asking myself why an hour in a folding chair had begun to take me apart at the seams, I built a wall and put her on the other side of it.
By Friday I’d made myself harder to reach. Too much work. Too many meetings. Anything that kept me out of range of the look Alyssa would give me when she saw I wasn't quite myself. That some part of me had already started blaming her for getting me to a place where I was this vulnerable.
I’d spent years maintaining boundaries, keeping separate from the messy emotional things that derailed other people. With Alyssa, I’d let those boundaries blur. Let her see parts of me I’d never shared withanyone. And now, sitting with all these uncomfortable feelings bubbling up, I remembered why I’d kept those walls in place to begin with.
43/
do i look better to you?
julian
I hadn’t beenable to sleep. It had been a week since Alyssa’s grief group. A week of dreams about Mama that left me waking up sweating with my heart palpitating and my hands shaking. Of staring at reports and seeing nothing but numbers that don't add up right.
A week of avoiding Alyssa.
I pride myself on discipline and routine. Structure that kept all the moving parts of my life functioning exactly as they should. Now I couldn’t even get through a morning meeting without my mind drifting to things that should stay buried.
Alyssa had been trying to reach me, I answered enough to keep it from becoming a thing. A text back, a line about a deadline, a reason lunch wouldn’t work.
