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My anger powered me through my week. That, and coffee. I was having trouble falling and staying asleep. Many nights, I tossed and turned, fighting my sheets and punching my pillow to make it more comfortable. And when I was able to get to sleep, all I dreamt of was Ciara.
I started taking melatonin to knock myself out. It helped, for a while.
Still, as the weeks went by and my anger started to wane, it became increasingly difficult to ignore all the feelings I had kept buried. The lingering grief, and anger, I felt at my mom for daring to die. The anger I felt at Ciara not trusting our love, trustingmylove, to sustain our relationship. The sadness and utter panic I felt in Ciara’s absence, and the loss of touch that came with her departure. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I was to having Ciara in my physical space until she was no longer there. Worse than that, it didn’t seem like she knew how big of a presence she had, how quickly and quietly she had integrated herself into my life and nestled into my heart.
It was devastating.
I tried to numb the pain in every healthy way I could—exercise, hanging out with Harold and my brothers, working—but nothing helped. I was still encumbered with thoughts of Ciara.
“Maybe you should go to therapy,” Brandon suggested one night.
We were sitting on his patio, as was our habit these days, watching the sun sink behind the trees. The air was thick, heavy with moisture and the dregs of summer, and the crickets sang. July in Massachusetts could go either way: it could be unseasonably cold, with the temperature cool at night and just barely warm during the day, or it could be the way it was this July, with the air like water and the heat seemingly endless.
I sipped from my beer to buy myself some time to respond to Brandon’s suggestion. Finally, I said, “It’s not that I have anything against therapy—”
“Here we go,” Brandon muttered, shaking his head.
“—It’s just that…well, what are they gonna tell me that I don’t already know? I’m sad because my wife left on some bullshit, and I’m still grieving the loss of our mother. I just need to power through these feelings, get over myself, and keep it pushin’.”
“Having a neutral person to talk through feelings can help you get through those feelings,” Brandon replied. “I know it’s helped me.”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise, assessing him. “You go to therapy?”
Brandon raised an eyebrow right back. “Why are you surprised?”
I tried to fix my face, as my parents used to say, so that I didn’t seem so judgmental. “I don’t know, I guess…it’s less about the therapy and more that you have any hard feelings about Mom’s death. Y’all didn’t exactly get along.”
“So? She’s still my mother. And I still love her.” He finished off his wine, holding the glass in his hand as he stared out into his backyard. “Her death has had a weird effect on me. I needed to talk about it with someone.”
I frowned, worried for my brother. “Weird how?”
He sighed, brushing a hand over his beard. “Well, for one, I kept getting angry anytime someone would idolize her after her death. It was as if I was infuriated by the simplest compliment toward her character or who she was when she was alive. I couldn’t stand to hear it. It was as if…” He blew out a breath, brows furrowed. “As if they only wanted to remember the good, never the bad.”
“But will people really walk up to a grieving son and talk shit about his dead mother?” I shrugged. “Seems pretty normal for people to focus on the good.”
“Normally, I would agree, but even Dad does it. He chastised me every time I brought up something negative about Mom, telling me not to dishonor the deceased. And it was that same vibe with everyone else, too.
“But in not dishonoring the deceased, people forget about the people that are left. The living. We spend so much time worrying about the feelings of the dead that we forget to take care of the living. Those that have died, whether they ended up in Heaven or elsewhere, don’t have tangible feelings. They don’t care how we speak about them. So why do we care about their feelings more than ours?”
I thought about that for a moment, fiddling with my watch. Brandon’s musings hit close to home, as always. There was a sweet tension between remembering my mother as she was—caring, kind, but also tenacious and overbearing—and remembering her as everyone wanted to remember her: a saint, an angel on Earth. Perfect.
“Also, it’s disingenuous, remembering people the way we want to remember them, instead of the way they were.” Brandon shot me a look. “For all her flaws, Mom wouldn’t want to be remembered that way.”
He turned away to look at the horizon again. “There's beauty in the imperfection, in the cracks of one’s personality. Smoothing it over doesn’t help anyone. It definitely didn’t help me. So I went to therapy. To have a space to say all the things no one else wanted to hear.”
“And to help with the grief?” I asked.
“And that.”
We were silent for a while after that, just listening to the sounds of nature. Brandon made good points, things that made me think differently about what I was going through. So, the next day, I made an appointment with a therapist.
I had been going to therapy for several weeks, working through things, when I got a series of texts from Ciara that made me stop in my tracks.
Ciara: Hey, Nathan. I know we haven’t talked in a while, and you haven’t responded to my texts, but I thought I’d give it one last try. I’m done with the summer program, and I’m about to transfer into the full program. Thought it would be good to see you as I have a week off in between.
Ciara: Also, I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s best if we just cut ties with each other once we hit the six-month mark of our marriage. It’s obvious you don’t even want to talk to me, and I think our relationship has run its course. I can start the paperwork during my week-long break so you don’t have to.
Ciara: Let me know by midnight tomorrow. I fly out in the afternoon. I love you; hope to hear from you soon.
