The younger woman was Keisha. She had lost her mother six months ago, and she was so angry about it that it filled the room. Nina recognized that anger because she’d felt it too in those early months, before the anger burned out like a shooting star and then left just numbness behind.
The couple in their seventies were Frank and Rose. They had lost their grandson to leukemia. He was only seven years old. Rose spoke, and Frank just stared at the floor like he wanted to be swallowed up by the earth.
Then it was Nina’s turn.
“My name is Nina. I lost my husband, David, two years ago. He had a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old.”
She said it simply, the way she had learned to say it without the wobble in her voice. The wobble was still there a little bit, somewhere hiding underneath.
Claire spoke. “I’m Claire, and I’m just here for Nina.”
“I’m Harper, same.”
Susie nodded, and Nina saw several people in the circle look over at Claire and Harper. Maybe they envied them because they weren’t in that room due to losing someone. Or maybe they just wondered who would drive hours on a Saturday to sit in a folding chair in a farmhouse because they loved you.
The morning exercises were structured and careful. Susie guided them through breathing exercises that Nina found surprisingly difficult. Not because breathing was hard, but because being still in a quiet room that was full of grief just made everything feel harder.
She guided them through a visualization where they were asked to picture a place where they felt safe. Nina pictured her kitchen on Edisto at six in the morning with David at the window, coffee in his hand.
She didn’t cry, not during the breathing or the visualization. She felt tears building behind her eyes, like pressure behind a dam, but she held them back. Nina’s grief had always been a private thing for her. She had no plans to change that now. Elena’s grief was a bonfire, but Nina’s was a locked room.
After lunch, Susie gave each of them a notebook and a pen.
“This afternoon, I’d like you to write a letter to the person you lost. Say whatever it is that you need to say, whatever you haven’t said, whatever you’ve been holding onto, afraid to speak. You don’t have to share it with anybody. If you choose to, there will be time this evening.”
Nina looked at the blank page. She had not written a letter to David. She hadn’t spoken to him out loud either, not in the way people speak to the dead. Because speaking to David meant acknowledging that he couldn’t speak back. She talked about him. She said his name. She told stories. But she did not talk to him, because talking to someone who isn’t there is the loneliest thing a person can do.
She picked up the pen.
Nina wrote for two hours straight. She sat on the farmhouse’s front porch in one of the rocking chairs and just wrote. Claire and Harper were inside. She could hear them through the open window, their voices low, talking to George and Diana. They were doing what they always did, showing up for people, trying to be present and useful. Nina loved them for it, and she needed to be alone for this anyway.
The letter started formally, which was kind of crazy, because she’d never been formal with David in her life.
Dear David, she wrote.
Then she crossed it out and wrote David. Then she crossed that out too, because just his name on the page made her feel like her chest was going to cave in. She sat there with the pen in her hand and crossed out words, staring at her.
Then she finally thought, just start, just start anywhere. He’s not going to judge you. He never judged you.
She started with the morning he died. She had never written it down. She had told the story to the police, to the hospital, to Elena, to Claire, and Harper, but she’d never put it on paper, because putting it on paper felt different and permanent. Speaking was just putting words out into the air, and it dissipated, but the paper stayed.
She wrote about that morning, how normal it was, how impossibly and terrifyingly normal. Coffee, toast, and David kissing her on the forehead on his way out the door, which he did every morning. Putting his hand on her shoulder for half a second. Lucia was already at school, and the house was quiet. Nina was standing at the kitchen window, watching her beloved marsh, thinking about nothing, or maybe thinking about groceries, or maybe thinking about whether she needed to call the plumber about the drip in the bathroom sink. It was just a normal Tuesday, the most normal Tuesday.
Then the phone rang, and a voice she didn’t know said words that she couldn’t process in the moment. And the normal Tuesday became the day the world ended.
She wrote about the hospital, about the waiting room with its terribly uncomfortable chairs and its horrible coffee, about the flickering bright fluorescent lights that made everything look dead. Elena arrived with her rosary and a fury, because Elena fought grief the way she fought everything, like a gladiator, on her feet with God in one hand and rage in the other.
Claire arrived twenty minutes later, still in her school clothes with chalk on her fingers. Harper arrived from Charleston wearing heels, having driven ninety miles an hour. Nina knew it because Harper later told her with no apology.
She wrote about the funeral, about Lucia, 14, standing in front of the church in a black dress that was way too big, because who buys a funeral dress for their 14-year-old? She sang the song that David loved, her voice small and clear and absolutely unbearable, and Elena collapsed into the chair afterward and said in Spanish, “My boy, my boy, my beautiful boy.”
And Nina holding her because there was nobody else to hold Elena. And holding someone while your own heart is shattering to pieces is the hardest thing Nina has ever done.
She wrote about the after, the cards and casseroles, the people who had said, he’s in a better place, trying to mean well, and the people who said, call me if you need anything, and the people who said nothing because they just didn’t know what to say, and how people who said nothing were often the ones who helped the most, because at least they didn’t ask her to feel grateful that the love of her life, her soulmate, was in a better place that she couldn’t see or touch.
She wrote about the numbness, about the glass wall she lived behind, about the months of going through motions, making the coffee, driving Lucia to school, existing in a life that was completely empty from the inside out, about sitting in parking lots, about the television left on, about leaving his boots by the door because she couldn’t move them, because it would mean he was never coming back through it.
And then she wrote about the pact, about the napkin, about Hank's and the karaoke and the way her voice cracked on the high note, but she kept singing, about the polar plunge and the way the cold had shocked her body back into feeling something, about Señora Morales’s kitchen and the mole and the index cards, and about how Elena had said, good girl, on the phone, about the tattoo, about his initials on her skin forever, about Asheville and the hotel room and the first night she slept through the night without reaching for him, and about how that made her feel good and guilty, about Sam and his kind face and his garden design for the hospice center, and about the way she had checked his name on that card and felt guilty and free at the same time.
