Through the Glass, Darkly

A picture frame sits on the mantel, its edges gathering dust. The once-vibrant colors inside have begun to fade, their sharpness softened by time. A family of three smiles back from behind the glass—a man, a woman, and a small boy, no older than five. Their happiness, captured in that instant, is eternal. But for the man standing before it now, glass in hand, it is a relic of another life.

He swirls the whiskey absently, the ice clinking against the walls of his tumbler. The sound is sharp, echoing through a house too big for one. He has read about sensory memory—how sound, scent, or touch can resurrect the past without warning. The brain’s hippocampus, tasked with memory consolidation, does not differentiate between past and present. And so, the clink of ice takes him back to the clatter of laughter, the scrape of a chair against the floor, the hum of soft music filling these walls.

But those sounds no longer belong to him.

He tips the glass back, letting the fire burn down his throat. The alcohol helps—temporarily. It dulls the edges of the thoughts that haunt him. There are studies on this too, how alcohol affects the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors in the brain, slowing neural activity, quieting the storms inside. It is supposed to help him sleep. But it never does.

Because every night, when he closes his eyes, they are there.

The nightmares are a tangle of half-truths and memories, distorted through the lens of grief. He sees her face—his wife—turned away in anger, her lips forming words he can’t quite hear. He sees their son’s small hand gripping hers as they walk away from him, the weight of their absence pressing down on his chest. The guilt is unbearable. It forms its own kind of ghost, one that follows him even in the waking world.

He tells himself, over and over, that it wasn’t his fault. But the human brain is not so easily deceived. Psychologists call it counterfactual thinking—the mind’s tendency to replay events, altering small details, imagining different outcomes. If I had just said something else… If I had held her hand instead of letting her go… If I had run after them…

He never did. And now, he never can.

The accident had been sudden. One moment, they were driving away, the rain turning the world to silver streaks. The next, twisted metal, shattered glass, flashing lights. He had been told that neither of them suffered. But suffering is not measured in the moment of impact—it lingers in the aftermath, in th

It has been a year, but time has become meaningless. The past and present blur together, the memories sharper than the reality he inhabits. He wonders if the brain is capable of breaking under the weight of grief—if synaptic connections, overburdened by sorrow, eventually misfire and fold in on themselves. There is science behind this too. Studies have shown that prolonged grief can physically alter the brain, shrinking the prefrontal cortex, increasing activity in the amygdala—the center of fear and pain.

But reality is persistent. It greets him every morning in the silence of this house.

The ball still sits by the back door. His son’s favorite toy. He should have put it away months ago, but he can’t. The act of moving it feels like erasing something vital. There is a term for this—prolonged grief disorder. When

There is a solution. A way to quiet the monsters permanently.

He stares at the picture frame. The last evidence that they were here, that they were real.

He wonders if they are waiting for him. If there is something beyond this—a place where they are whole and happy, untouched by the violence of that night. The idea is tempting. There are psychological theories on this, too—how the brain, when confronted with unbearable grief, begins to consider escape as the only logical conclusion. Suicidal ideation is the clinical term, but to him, it just feels like gravity.

But then, something unexpected happens.

As he grips the frame, his thumb smudging the glass, he notices something small. Something he hadn’t seen before.

A fingerprint.

His son’s, left there long ago. A tiny, imperfect smudge. A piece of him, still here.

His breath catches in his throat. The brain processes grief in complex ways, but sometimes, the simplest details—something tangible, something real—can disrupt the spiral. The sight of that fingerprint is a shock to his system, a moment of clarity cutting through the haze.

He doesn’t want to die.

Not really.

He just doesn’t know how to live like this.

But maybe—just maybe—there is still a way forward. Not by erasing the past, but by carrying it. By learning to live with the ghosts, instead of letting them consume him.

He sets the frame down gently.

For the first time in a year, he does not pour another drink.

For the first time in a year, he lets himself cry.

And for the first time in a year, he thinks—maybe—he can survive this.