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Aaron,
Two raindrops met on the windshield, and I thought of you. You used to make a game of it, to see which raindrop would make it to the bottom the fastest, hoping that your favorite drop could avoid the wiper. I sat in our car and waited today, hoping the rain would let up. So I played your game, wipers off. Every single drop I chose collided with my chosen competitor.
I call that a loss. You’d find some way to spin it into a good thing. You’d tell me it meant that the two didn’t want to fight and understood that sportsmanship far exceeded the need for competition. That the drops knew of their finality and, in their short life, would rather find a friend to see it through than compete against their own for our amusement.
Until your raindrop won, then you’d call your raindrop a tried and true adversary—a champion. And then I’d remind you that no matter which drop made it to the bottom, you were the loser because we were on our way to your colonoscopy. Then you’d one-up me by reminding me that they’d pump you full of drugs, and you’d have the best nap of your life. I’d concede and say you were the winner.
Every single drop I picked seemed destined for failure. The rain fell too hard for any single drop to stand a fighting chance. They didn’t last long enough for me to give them a name, let alone guess where they’d fall once they reached the bottom. Still, I tried one hundred times and lost one hundred times. You were so much better at this.
I left the radio off, hoping the rainfall would bring me some sense of serenity. Dry as I may have been, and no matter how well the car protected me, I felt no comfort. The rain pelted above me and surrounded me with metallic clanging, masking the ringing in my ears but replacing it with something more sinister—more stimulating than I hoped for.
It’s just the grocery store. I don’t need to sit here for an hour. I had my trench coat and my umbrella. It was only six items: rice, eggs, oranges, bananas, milk, and rye bread. They weren’t for anything special, we were just out of it all. I’ve been going to the store more frequently, sometimes three times a week. I need something to do. I need something to fill my time. I need space away from Barnaby.
What does that make me as a mother, Aaron? He’s seventeen. He didn’t ask for this. I asked for him. I begged God for a son, and you answered, hand in hand. You made it work. And yet now there are so many days when I look at our home and think it would be easier without me in it.
I need you here. I need my partner. I need my lover. I need the father you were and the father you deserve to be. You never missed anything, yet there is so much left to miss. Graduation is a stone’s throw away, and what used to excite Barnaby now fills him with dread. He doesn’t know how to be an adult yet. We were supposed to help him through this. He won’t even go to school anymore.
I don’t blame the boy who hit you. I don’t blame you, despite your insistence on picking up groceries on some inconsequential rainy day simply because I had a headache. Had I slogged across the house and grabbed my coat and shoes at a snail’s pace to prevent my head from pulsing, there’s a chance that we would still be a family. I’ve run through the scenario in my head many times, and I’m sure I would have arrived at that intersection five minutes later than you did.
But then that boy would have struck another car. That boy would still have killed someone—a father, a mother, a child. That boy would face the same ridicule. That boy would still never drive again. That boy would still drop out of school. And somebody’s beloved would still be gone. He, too, was grocery shopping. What kind of parent sends their child out in torrential rainfall to grab groceries?
Your joy quieted a loud mind. The quiet surrounding your absence makes the ringing in my ears all the more noticeable. I curse a younger Elana who thought it was okay to go to concerts without earplugs. But it wouldn’t much change that I’m here and you’re gone. You made nonsense necessary—a lifeline I never knew I needed. You loved nonsense, and you did it to make us laugh. It worked every time. You were a flash in the pan. Your story wasn’t done. At least it shouldn’t have been.
I can’t make sense of it. I don’t really know if I should. I worry that thinking about it even more will snap me from reality. But then, if I snapped, would I see you again? Would I be freed from this trance, from this trick the universe is playing on me? This nightmare would end, and we’d be a family again. Our son would have his confidence back, his joy.
You were so much better at this. Your fatherhood balanced my motherhood out, so I didn’t look horrible—too horrible, at least. You compensated for the worst of me, for the days where I yelled at Laurie not because she did anything wrong but because I was angry. I was angry for no reason, for more than I was willing to admit, until you left, and there was nobody to stop me, nobody to remind me that there are more important things in life than work, sibling rivalry, and anger. I should know better. Our daughter hasn’t spoken to me since the accident. I’m not ready to talk about it. When people ask how she’s doing, I tell them she’s fine. But she’s not, and I can’t help her because she won’t let me. Barnaby needs help, but I can’t help him because I don’t know how. He’s been a bear to raise alone. You’d have known what to do about it.
There was so much left behind. There’s so much left to do. There is a bathroom that was, as you insisted, ‘perfect’ in your mind. You had the vision and didn’t get to see it through. In place of purported perfection sits sage green walls and a floor substituted with an orange underlayment, slowly driving me insane. You called it our ‘Halloween Room,’ but the true horror of it is that it’s now well beyond Halloween, and I don’t know what to do. The contractor never called back. Your absence, it seems, freed him from his obligations.
Days like this, where rainfall keeps me in my car instead of moving on with my day, make me question the volume of death. How quiet would it be, and how long would it take for you to fill my life with the unnecessary noise that has become so necessary in your absence? Or would fate make us two competing raindrops destined to lose to the windshield wipers? More often than not, I wish to find out, but I don’t have the strength to do what I’d need to do to find you again, if at all.
There’s more for me to do, I know. There’s a life for me and Barnaby. You’d made that clear plenty of times, that in your absence, the only thing you’d ever want for me is to be happy, to move on. I didn’t expect to have to move on so soon, but here I am, in a grocery store parking lot, competing with the duality of life and death, silence and noise, and calm and ire. It would be easier if I hated you. Still, the only thing I’m mad at you about is that you aren’t here to tell me it will be okay seven times and for me not to believe you until you get angry about it, so I finally have a tangible target for my frustrations. I’m mad that we don’t have that dance anymore. You’d dance around for hours because you thought I was worth it. I don’t have that same grace for myself. I don’t know where I start this journey without you. I need you still, but you can’t come back.
This isn’t like reminding me there’s food at home when I want to order Indian food, then getting the Indian food anyway. There’s no debate. I can’t get what I want unless I kill myself, and even then, there’s no guarantee I’d see you on the other side. Would you even forgive me if I did? Probably not. It means our son gets left behind to fend for himself. His sister won’t care for him; she made that plenty clear. If there’s anything she and I agree on, it’s that Barnaby is, quite literally, a bear.
Love forever,
Elana
***
Twenty of us met every Sunday at the high school to make sense of death. According to Francine, our de-facto leader, eighty-seven married couples in Warwick in our age group lost a spouse last year. Ten percent of those deaths were from freak accidents like falls or explosions. Two percent were drownings, one percent were murders, one percent were shootings, thirty-seven percent were illness, and the remaining forty-nine percent were ‘miscellaneous.’
Another car collided with Aaron’s on the rainiest day on record for Rhode Island, just a mile from our home. The traffic lights short-circuited five minutes before he arrived at the intersection. Any rational person would have looked at the weather and decided that the groceries could wait. Had Aaron waited for me to go instead, the rain would have let up, and I would have been driving to the scene of someone else’s accident. Perhaps the accident would have zapped me out of my funk, and I’d trade my headache for the horror any mother sees when driving by a collision.
I’ve played that over and over in my head for months. In most cases, I’m turning the car around because of the traffic. I return home and tell Aaron about the horror I saw, that this poor kid’s life is forever changed because he struck another car at forty miles an hour and killed someone. Other times, I get so impatient that I cut through the parking lot for Shannon’s Pub, shop for our groceries, and return home to Aaron, worried sick that I was the car that got struck, and I apologize for not letting him know because I know he’s a worrier.
That’s the fiction that plays in my head. I labor over the unreal because these daydreams still have Aaron in them. Instead, he’s a memory to me and a statistic to others, one of the ten percent who died from a freak accident in Warwick this year. I feel worse for those whose spouses died for miscellaneous reasons. To lose the love of their lives and have their death essentially classified as ‘other’ felt so dehumanizing.
The first day I joined the group, I brought the grocery list. It was in Aaron’s car, along with a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, his baseball glove, and a stuffed bear made of white corduroy that he’d designed in a sewing class. He was much better at filling time than I was. He made a hell of a lot more friends indulging in hobbies. I wrote. It was much lonelier.
The grocery list should mean nothing to me. It was a standard list: chicken breast, chicken thighs, kielbasa, onions, zucchini, carrots, bananas, blackberries, black grapes, potatoes, chips, rice crackers, rice paper, spaghetti, pudding mix, baking powder, peanuts, cookie-flavored cereal, watermelon licorice, and Grapples (if they have them).
It didn’t mean anything to me when I wrote it, not that groceries SHOULD mean anything besides sustenance. It was a more extensive list than usual. We finished most of our produce before an Alaskan cruise and were restocking with the essentials. We shopped for most of it every week. At Barnaby’s insistence, the list always ended with ‘Grapples (if they have them)’ because he loved them. I never really understood the appeal of a grape-flavored apple, but it got him to eat apples, so we made sure to put in the effort to find them.
Yet, at that first meeting, where they forced all the newcomers to introduce themselves, I stood up and pulled out that list. I introduced myself as Elana Johnson and proceeded to read the entire grocery list from top to bottom before breaking down in tears. I explained that Aaron’s ink-stained fingerprint was permanently stamped beside the watermelon licorice.
Not a single person judged me. Nobody smirked at the sight of me sobbing over the grocery list. They gave me space when I panicked as a tear dropped near (but not on) Aaron’s fingerprint. Everyone who came before me knew this moment all too well, and everyone after me would find it eventually. Mine came during that first meeting, but it could be weeks before another of the women had that breakthrough. Some found it every single week.
The group gave me more strength than I deserved, mainly because I spent the rest of my weeks so exhausted. That didn’t stop me from bringing the grocery list every week—I kept it in my purse most days anyway, but now and then, it would come out so I could show it to a new member to give them some grace and remind them that it’s okay to cry at the inconsequential. It allowed me to talk about my husband and what it means when the unnecessary becomes necessary.
The real hero of this group is Francine. She put in the work to make this group possible. Two hundred women have come and gone from the group to navigate the journey of loss. She, like me, sought out noise for an otherwise deafening silence and courageously filled that void with the noise of others’ grief. She’d heard many stories over the years but managed a smile for everyone.
Despite our similar age, she thinks of all the women as her children. She never had her own. Her story comes to light occasionally, but she prefers to make space for others rather than revisit her own, which works for her. I’ve only heard it secondhand—twenty-one years ago, at a ripe nineteen years of age, Francine and her husband Kevin lost their child to a miscarriage. As many at nineteen would attest, the pregnancy wasn’t expected. Their love was the only thing each of them ever knew and, much to the chagrin of their parents, the two hoped to keep the baby. When fate had other plans, Kevin made alternate arrangements. Now, Francine’s ‘grocery list’ is Kevin’s apology note, which she admits to never opening because it would bring some unwelcome visions back into her line of sight.
I have a morbid curiosity about the contents of that letter, as I’m sure others in the group have, but I swallow that because Francine is the most amazing person I’ve ever met. Anyone who crosses her path could learn a lot from her tenacity, and if she did choose to explore parenthood again, I’d likely learn even more from her about how to be a good mother.
Barnaby loves me; I know he does. We’ve never fought. Well, he’s never fought back. I’ve yelled at him for no reason many, many times. Aaron was much better at defusing a situation. Barnaby never stood up for himself. His most mature quality has always been his capacity for forgiveness. Many things are holding him back, but he has a big heart and deep empathy for others, just like his father. I’ve sacrificed a lot in my career, but when I came home, he still called me Mom, wanted a hug, and still asked for grape-flavored apples.
After the session, I stayed to help Francine rearrange the school’s cafeteria. The last woman to speak, Brande, had offered a grim play-by-play of her own husband’s murder-suicide attempt that she believed he’d reversed the order of by accident. I’d wondered if that hit close to home for Francine, and I hoped to check in on her. Despite everything she heard, she smiled as she stacked chairs.
“How are you feeling, Francine?”
“Thankful for your help, Elana.”
“About what Brande said?” I clarified.
“Relieved that she had the opportunity and felt safe enough to share that with a group of strangers. This will be good for her; I just know it.”
Francine had a true, genuine smile. There weren’t any cracks behind it, no facade. She believed what she was saying.
“You seem worried,” she suggested.
“I am,” I admitted.
Francine finished her stack of chairs and gestured for me to help her reset the long cafeteria tables.
“This is my purpose, Elana. This group needs me. They need each other, and they need you.”
“And you need us.”
“Of course, that goes without saying.”
“I was just wondering if Brande’s story struck you for a… particular reason.”
“It’s okay, you can say it,” Francine encouraged.
“Suicide.”
“It’s her story to tell. I’ve been telling mine in some capacity for years. Even when I’m not sharing, this—all of this—is a result of my story. I don’t take that for granted. I am truly relieved that a person can share their darkest moments here, with me, because I know what could happen if they didn’t.”
“I admire that, Francine.”
She pointed to me with a gleaming smile.
“And that, right there, makes it all worth it. Let’s grab a drink sometime. Sorry, a mocktail, I don’t drink.”
“I’d like that.”
I grabbed my coat and made my way to the exit.
“One more thing,” Francine insisted, “Barnaby, how is he doing with all of this? Is he adjusting?”
“He’s been a bit of a bear,” I replied.
Her smile briefly faded.
“Yeah, you keep saying that, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“You’re doing your best,” Francine said, her smile returning. “I’m hoping to have the parents bring in their kids and expand the program for families. It’d be nice to help Barnaby through his… bearishness.”
“Maybe,” I quipped, leaving without saying goodbye.
I needed the group. Every Sunday was like a jolt to my system, a reminder that I’m not alone in this, no matter how lonely life feels without Aaron. It was a reminder that I am still a woman, that I am beautiful, and that I am making the best of a bad situation.
But then on the ride home, I remember that I’m a liar, or at least a redactor. I rarely, if ever, discuss Barnaby with the group. They know he exists, but I move on to the next subject as fast as possible when asked about him. I’d always say the same thing, that ‘he’s a bear’ as if it means something intangible. People assume I’m just talking about a difficult transition; that Barnaby is navigating his path through fatherlessness with extreme difficulty. ‘He’s a bear’ is construed as him doing poorly in school, isolating himself, losing friends, or grappling with evolving out of adolescence.
They’re only half right. Barnaby poorly navigated life without his father. Aaron was his guiding light, his moral compass. Aaron was there every day. He never worked because he didn’t have to; I practically forbade it. He was Barnaby’s tutor, his coach, and his best friend. In return, Barnaby was simply the best kid there could be. His struggles in school were supplemented by his eagerness to do better, but that eagerness dissolved without Aaron. I couldn’t match his momentum. He was six months to graduation. That timeline was thrown out the window when the superintendent visited our house to inform us that Barnaby had missed too many school days.
He’s not transitioning out of adolescence. If anything, he’s returning to it. Barnaby lost his independence when he needed it most. There were days where any decision, big or small, would send him into a panic attack, usually followed by some angry rant about how Dad would never do what I did. I know he didn’t mean it; he needed a scapegoat, and I was there. But it’s exhausting. Friends suggested I start small; I wondered how much smaller I’d need to go before he could make a bigger decision.
Well, he made one. And every day, when I came home, Barnaby was on the couch, six foot five and one-hundred and eighty pounds, covered head to toe in white fur—a relic of a costume of a polar bear I’d named after him sixteen years ago.
He had nothing left to say, so he said nothing at all. He had nowhere to go, so he did nothing. Any time I’d try to coax something out of him, even a grunt (though a growl, I suppose, would be fitting), he’d stare at me—at least, the beady black eyes of his mask would—then go back to his routine.
Aaron would’ve had a solution. He always did. Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if it only worked for a little while, he had this quiet way of knowing what each of us needed: the right food, the right story, the right kind of silence.
He would’ve known how to fix it, or at least soothe the edges of the pain until it passed. But now Barnaby wouldn’t eat or drink. At least, not much. Every bite was a battle, every sip a negotiation, and I was on the losing side. His body was still here, but his spirit had retreated somewhere I couldn’t follow. I tried everything I could think of — coaxing, reasoning, even pleading — but nothing got through to him.
I couldn’t explain that a hunger strike wouldn’t bring Aaron back, no matter how noble or pure his grief might feel. And truthfully, I didn’t blame him. I understood it more than I wanted to. If I thought for even a second that refusing food could conjure him from the other side — if I believed it might collapse the wall between our world and his — I’d have joined him in a heartbeat, just for a chance to see his face again.
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