I was twenty nine years old and still, nearly a year later, unable to properly function after my mother died. People tell you grief gets lighter with time, and maybe it does eventually, but no one warns you about the strange flat months in the middle, when the sharpest pain has dulled but nothing has moved in to take its place, and you drift through your days like a person underwater, hearing everything a half second too late. That was where I lived that year. Underwater. My mother had been the whole of my family, the two of us against the world since my father left when I was small, and when the cancer took her over the course of one terrible autumn, it did not just take a person. It took the only place where I had ever fully belonged. I was an only child with no partner and few close friends, and after the funeral I found myself in a silence so complete it had a texture to it, a weight, something I had to push through just to make coffee in the morning.
I kept my job, barely. I worked as a bookkeeper for a small firm, numbers in columns, a job quiet enough that I could do it half submerged, and my supervisor was kind about the days I came in with red eyes and left early. But the evenings and the weekends were an ocean, and I began to understand how people simply stop, how they let the dishes pile up and the mail go unopened and the world narrow to the distance between the bed and the couch. I was frightened of becoming that person. And out of that fear, more than out of any nobility, I started volunteering at the hospital.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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