A Dramatic Slow-Down

a meditation on the grief that accompanies losing a child

It’s 9:12PM and approximately thirty-two days have passed since the funeral. The air has grown thick with grief, palatable and certain. He prepares for sleep on one side of the bed and she prepares on the other. Both of them remain awake for the majority of the night. One looks at the alarm clock and the walls. The other learns how to cry quietly through closed eyes.

Their daughter lays between them, not as a body, but the imprint of a human who had been alive once and simply isn’t anymore. Simply is an adverb either can do without.

In the morning, when they swing the sheets away from their bodies and enter the day, there is a residue of loss. Neither of them speak, but they do know how to move around each other. Love requires a certain maintenance, and even if neither of them know how to use language through words, they are able to exchange care in the passing of milk or the setting of a bowl.

The anger of each is quiet and lethal. They do not touch one another in fear that it will cause a fracture neither of them would know entirely what to do with.

The casseroles keep coming. Their deep freeze is full. They are grateful it’s winter. The cold and barren landscape fits.

Nothing but white for miles, he thinks as he removes the snow from her car.

She drives to the firm where she is an accountant, enters numbers in spreadsheets, calculates the distance from their house to the graveyard on a post-it. The distance is reasonable. Never having been one to believe in ghosts, she would welcome a haunting now.

He would too. Their pain shares similar trajectories, though not all tangents are the same.

Without their daughter, there is an absence of weight. He picks up a book to read. The words sink into themselves. Paper has become a place for situations that are nondescript, unable to contain, a void. He sets it aside, glances out the window before deciding to chop firewood.

It’s helpful to know what to do with one’s hands, he thinks.

There is a certain measure of comfort in physical labor. The act of straining one’s body requires focus and discipline. One wrong move and he could chop off a limb. Despite not wanting to be alive at times, he is fundamentally concerned about his wife who has developed a fixation on numbers. She was always slightly enamored with math, but this feels different somehow.

She has begun muttering nonsense about miles, calculating distances, tallying how many minutes it takes to go from here to there. Amazon recently delivered a book on the frequencies of spirits, how they resonate, if and when they can travel through walls. It runs a little deeper than her usual interest in quantum physics.

Before returning home from the office, she stops by the graveyard. There’s a span of time in which she sits in her car staring at the tombstones. She wonders if six feet is a far length to travel, how cold the soil is, if it’s freezing enough to delay decomposition. She knows that her daughter’s body is likely still fresh, but it won’t remain that way forever.

If there was a way I could speak to her again, she thinks.

He is waiting for her at the door. Arm’s length, but he is waiting.

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