the next never ends

Grief is a stormcloud behind my temple, fogging my thoughts and dripping condensation until the skin beneath my eyes feels heavy and swollen with unshed tears. I drift through the day, completing tasks that require minimum mental capacity as time skips, stutters, stumbles around me. An hour passes in an instant; the next never ends. 

For the first time, I think: He’ll be with Jesse, again. And that’s when the world truly freezes. Because I’m picturing a quiet little plot of land in a cemetery I’ve only visited a handful of times: one half the resting place of a grandmother I never knew, the other empty.

She’s been waiting for him a long time, I think. 

I’m also picturing an old black-and-white photograph of Jesse and Isaac together. 

(I already miss the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled.)

He lived a long life, I tell others. He was stubborn to the end. We thought he’d leave us years ago. And it gets easier with the telling, each time I say these lines. It was a peaceful passing. Definitely the way to go. Easier, easier, until suddenly--it isn’t, again. 

The first thing that occurred to me when I heard the news was that I didn’t go see him the last time I was in town. That was on purpose. I said it was because I didn’t want to remember him like that, small and feeble and grouchy and hard of hearing and harder of comprehending. But I think secretly it was really because I didn’t want to experience the awkwardness, the second-hand embarrassment. 

I should have gone, anyway. 

I told my sister, during that first call just after she’d told me: He’s watching the polar bears in heaven, now. I think I like that image. He’ll have a television set playing the Blue Jays or curling, depending on the season. And a fishing rod and photo albums and apple trees. Card games for him to cheat.

There will be a second name carved into the stone on that plot of land, soon. A second coffin beneath its earth. But the trees will remain the same. The grass will turn green with the summer. The sky will rotate above, cycling between sun and stars and sun again. 

And we will carry on.