And then she wrote,
I’m learning to live without you. I hate that. I hate every single minute of it, but I’m doing it, David, because I have to. You would be furious with me if I didn’t. You would have stood in that kitchen and pointed at the marsh and said, look at that, mi amor. Look at that bird. Look at the sky. How can you not want to be fully alive for all of this?
I want to be alive for this. I want to be alive for Lucia and for Elena and for Claire and Harper and for myself. And maybe Sam, who seems kind and patient and doesn’t try to replace you, because no one could. He understands that without being told. And maybe not even for him. Maybe it will be someone else down the road. I just don’t know.
I love you, and I will always love you. But I can’t sit in parking lots anymore. I’m not going to leave the television on. I’m going to cook your grandmother’s recipes and teach them to Lucia. I’ll put those index cards in a box with your name on it so that a hundred years from now, someone in your family will make mole negro and it will taste like you.
I’m keeping your boots by the door because I’m not ready to move them yet. But I’m going to leave the door open now, David. I’m leaving it open.
She put the pen down. Her hand was cramping, and her face was wet. She didn’t even know when the tears had started, but they had, because the page was spotted with them, the ink blurred in places. And she didn’t care.
David would have said the best letters are the ones you can’t read through your tears.
She read the letter that evening. She hadn't intended to, but Susie said sharing was optional, and Nina had spent the afternoon fully intending to keep that letter very private, folded up in her notebook between herself, David, and the rocking chair.
When George read his letter to Barbara, his voice broke on her name, but he continued. It was so brave and bare that Nina felt something shift inside of her. Diana read her letter to her son. It was only four sentences long, but it destroyed the entire room. And Keisha, who had been angry all day, read a letter to her mother that began, “I’m so mad at you for leaving,” and ended, "but I understand why you were tired, and I forgive you." The room was weeping; everyone was even, and Harper, who was crying silently with her arms still crossed, had tears streaming down her face. Susie looked at Nina, and Nina just instinctively stood up.
She stood up and walked to the center of the circle, unfolded the letter, and read it all. The normal Tuesday, what happened at the hospital, Elena and her rosary, Lucia singing at the funeral, the numbness she felt, the parking lots, the television she left on. And then the pact, the karaoke, the mole, the tattoo, the boots still sitting by the door.
Her voice broke several times, but she kept going. She read it the way she’d sung at Hank’s, badly but bravely, and all the way through.
When she finished, the room was silent. It wasn’t the silence of a polite audience, but a sacred silence of people who had just witnessed something important and true. George was nodding. Diana was holding her notebook against her chest. And Frank, who hadn’t spoken all day, looked at Nina and said, “Thank you.”
His voice was rough like sandpaper, so full of grief that was old and had become a part of him. Nina understood that “thank you” meant you were saying the thing I couldn’t say. She nodded back.
She then sat down, and Claire and Harper were on either side of her. She felt Claire’s arm around her shoulders and Harper’s hand on her knee, and that is what broke her.
It wasn’t the controlled crying she’d done at Señora Morales’s stove. It wasn’t the quiet tears she normally let fall on the porch. These were full, uncontained, animal-grief tears she’d been holding back behind that wall for two years. Sounds came out of her that she didn’t recognize, guttural sounds below language, below thought, just the raw noise of her body finally releasing what it had been carrying for far too long.
She bent forward in the folding chair. Claire and Harper held onto her. The room held onto her. These twelve strangers, two friends, and a facilitator who knew the most important thing that she could do right now was just let it happen.
It lasted a long time, longer than Nina thought possible. And when she was done, she felt like her insides had been emptied out and scrubbed clean.
Susie brought her some water, and George handed her tissues. Diana, who had barely spoken to Nina, came and sat on the floor next to her and held her hand without saying a word.
Nina now understood this was what grief communities were for. They weren’t there to fix each other. They weren’t even there to make it better. They were just there to sit on the floor and hold hands and say, I know, I know, I’ve been there, and you’re not alone in this.
They drove home in the pitch dark. Claire drove, Harper sat in the passenger seat, and Nina lay in the back with her head against the window, watching the darkened trees slide by. She felt lighter than she had in two years. She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t healed. She just felt lighter, as if she’d been carrying a really heavy suitcase she didn’t know she could set down, and someone had finally said to her, “You can set that down now. It’ll still be there when you need it.”
Nobody said a word for a long time. The road unwound through the dark, past small towns with gas stations and church steeples, past fields that were invisible at night, but Nina could feel.
“Thank you,” Nina said. Her voice was hoarse at this point. She sounded like she’d been crying for an hour, which, of course, she had. “For coming and being there for me. For all of it.”
“You don’t need to thank us,” Harper said.
Harper had cried in that room and had not fully recovered from the indignity, which Nina found both touching and hilarious.
“Harper cried,” Claire said, because Claire was not going to let that go without being noticed.
“I had an allergic reaction.”
“To what?”
“Emotions. I’m allergic to emotions. It’s a confirmed medical condition.”
Nina laughed. It was the best laugh she’d had in months, even better than the one at Hank’s, because this one came from a place that had been emptied out. It could hold this, too. She’d proven that the emptiness could hold more than grief. It could also hold laughter and love and the particular joy of being in a car at ten o’clock at night with two women who had sat on a floor and held her while she fell apart, but were now making jokes about it because that was what thirty years of friendship had earned you. The right to laugh at each other during the worst moments. And no, the laughter wasn’t a betrayal.
Claire dropped Harper at her building in Charleston. Through the car window, Nina could see Harper’s light in the condo. She could hear music playing faintly through the open balcony door.
