Emily

Loving Emily was the closest thing I’ve ever felt to flying.

She thought I was smart and clever and funny, and her laughter felt like the sun on my face. She told me on our second date that weeping hearts were her favorite flower. I had never considered the question, but I wanted to be the kind of person who had a favorite flower, so I said tulips.

I remember the way her eyebrows inched towards judgment before I hastily added that I liked dark purple tulips best, because they reminded me of the goth girls I had crushes on in high school. Her face relaxed into an appreciative smirk before telling me their name: Queen of the Night. Little divas, all of them. I felt like I’d aced a quiz on lucky guesses; anxiety, relief and delight tangled in my chest.

*

Early on, the therapist said that grief isn’t linear. It doesn’t follow a neat cycle or progression of isolated stages.

She offered instead that grief comes in waves. She told me to imagine myself in a pond or a lake where a large stone had been dropped very close to me; the waves were both overwhelmingly high and close together. Time would pull me further from the stone; the waves I’d experience would feel smaller, more manageable, farther apart, until one day, I’d stand at the shore and only feel the barest tickle of grief between my toes.

Her suggestion implied that somewhere, the stone is always falling. If I refused to acknowledge this important loss, I’d stay close to the drop zone, forever trying to catch my breath, forever in the moment a crater opens in the water.

She wanted me to ride the waves and let them carry me away over time. The therapist was big on time.

I didn’t tell her that watching Emily die was the closest I’d ever felt to her. That I was terrified of time’s sticky hands and bottomless pockets, its hunger for small memories and the exact pitch of her voice.

I did know better than to tell the therapist that if I strayed too far from the place the stone fell, Emily wouldn’t be able to find me when she came back.

*

Emily once told me she hated baths. The idea of soaking in a slosh of her own suspended sloughed-off skin made her shudder. But she loved the smell of my bath bombs: rosemary and mint. She’d sit on the floor of the bathroom, especially in winter when the rest of the apartment was cold and dry, and read while I was in the tub.

Our last date before lockdown, we were getting ready to go out. I was frowning at myself in the mirror when she came up and slid her arms around me, hooking her chin over my shoulder and kissing my cheek. I closed my eyes and smiled. When I opened them, she was studying me in the mirror with the same wince she’d give after she messed up a chord.

We need to get you some better clothes.

She discovered an unexpected gift for teaching Sunday School music class over Zoom. Children lit up around her. Parents loved that she would keep their kids engaged long enough for them to sneak a cup of coffee in another room. She had a rich alto voice that begged you to sing along. She loved my harmonies, the way I could spin a counterpoint that complemented her perfectly. Her eyes sparkled when we sang.

It was her idea to go camping during our first pandemic summer. I sprained my ankle and didn’t get any sleep on our flimsy camping mattress, but Emily had me trained by then. She wouldn’t stop taking selfies until I gave her the smile she wanted.

Can you at least act like you’re happy to be with me?

Jamie couldn’t believe it when I told them about my manuscript. No matter how many times I explained to them she just wanted me to do better. That book wasn’t going anywhere. I needed to get away from it so I could move on, they just sighed and kept shaking their head.

She doesn’t get to decide that, Lee. And she definitely doesn’t get to destroy your manuscript as a form of persuasion!

I’d never seen Jamie lose their temper before. I decided they were having a bad day. I really had been clinging to a lousy novel premise for years, afraid to let go. I needed a drastic intervention. Yeah, it hurt, but didn’t I feel freer now?

*

Jamie, of course, never got to see Emily the way I did. No one did. Two days before I took her to the hospital, she hosted her Sunday School class, carefully propped up in our biggest chair. She beamed at the kids and told them she wanted to hear them sing, hiding the fact that she couldn’t take a big enough breath to join them.

Two hours later, she was lying on the floor, panting with the effort to crawl back to bed.

I remember the soft whimpers that made her seem so small. The way she clung to me, vulnerable in a way she never otherwise showed. The way she called for me when she needed help getting to the bathroom, an ugly, desperate, fearful intimacy. But it was indisputable, and I cherished it.

I would never be as important as she was, never as bright a star in other people’s constellations. But for seventeen days, I knew I was the most important person to her. The one she trusted. The one she kept, in spite of all my shortcomings.

I didn’t want her to get better. I didn’t want to lose her. As long as she was sick, she needed me, and I didn’t need anyone else.

When she was gasping for breath in the car, she tried to say my name with what little she had left. When the nurse came out to the parking lot to say it was our turn to go in, she mouthed I love you, baby, before they put the oxygen mask on her and wheeled her away.

I had a cough and a low grade fever for three days after. By the time I was clear, they’d stopped allowing visitors.

*

Two days before Emily died, her mother came to pick up a few things for her 10-minute goodbye visit in the ICU - only one visitor allowed. I hadn’t touched Emily’s journal, the stuffed orangutan she got as a child, the bottles of cough syrup or the thermometer. I kept dreaming she was next to me, rolling towards me so I would put my hands on her burning cheeks and forehead. Seeking me.

I started sleeping on the couch instead. There, I had actual nightmares, which were easier than the torture of sweet dreams.

*

I called Jamie to sit with me while the nurse held up the iPad to Emily’s swollen, pale, unresponsive face and squeezed my hand while I cried. Jamie worked with injured birds and had lost enough of them to understand this part. I sent them away when I needed to take my mask off and blow my nose. The nurse kept saying he was sorry, so sorry. He just knew that Emily had hung on this long because of how much she was loved. I know she loves you too, honey.

Emily would have asked his name and sent him a card with a little cash tucked in it, or maybe a coffee card. I just made the ASL sign for thank you over and over while he reached under his face shield to wipe his eyes. He told me the hospital would call when it was time to make arrangements, and I said no, her parents would handle that. We’re not married. We’re only 26. We were waiting for our turn to get vaccinated. She didn’t want to jump the line, I explained, like the nurse had time to care.

*

When I texted Olivia it’s over, she replied, I’m proud of you. You want help packing?

No, I said. She didn’t make it.

I stared at my phone, watching the three dots appear and disappear for five minutes before Olivia texted back. I’m so sorry. What food can I bring you?

Everyone sent food when Emily died. They dropped it off in paper bags on the apartment stoop, organized themselves to send delivery and groceries, honked their horns from the street and waved to me when I came to the windows, signing thank you over and over again.

Emily would’ve written thank-you notes and mailed them with seasonally appropriate stamps.

*

It’s not that I thought she’d really come back; I knew that denial is a natural part of the process. I knew that Emily’s body was in a refrigerated truck, and would be there until the burial. I knew all of this, and still. Tell that to the part of me that went with her, the part that was trying to find her way back to me.

Tell that to the part of me that woke up on the couch for weeks thinking it was all a dream and that actually, she left me.

Tell that to the moments when I felt relieved that she died before she could.

Instead, I told the therapist that every breath I took felt stolen; she nodded and told me earnestly that survivor’s guilt is a very common experience in situations like these. She added that anger often pairs with guilt the way a good Chianti pairs with a roasted leg of lamb. I gave her the breakthrough smile she was angling for.

I wasn’t angry at her for trying.

I wasn’t angry at Emily for dying.

I’ve performed a legitimate rage at any number of things. I’ve told the horror story of the understaffed emergency room, the ICU policies, the nurses draped in trash bags, the attending physician, who fell asleep standing up in the frame of the nurse’s camera, leaning against the wall of Emily’s room. I built a well-crafted rant that traced the failures at every level of government and medicine that’s guaranteed to stop a dinner party in its tracks - once we can have dinner parties again.

*

The therapist informed me that we were out of time for today, and she’d see me next week. I closed my laptop and headed to the freezer. It was still packed with neatly labeled Tupperware: curried lentils, roasted butternut squash, spinach and mushroom lasagna, black bean soup. People remembered that Emily was a vegetarian, but not that they were feeding me.

I shut the freezer and called out for a pizza. When it arrived, I breathed in the perfect spicy promise of hot pepperoni.

Jamie said it was important to do things like that, to reclaim the space as my own. I left my sweatshirt hanging over a chair for almost half a day until I snapped and hung it up. I waited two days to do the dishes before I realized that if I fell back into all my old habits, she definitely wouldn’t come back. I wouldn’t deserve it.

Grown-ass adults do their fucking dishes, Lee.

No one asked me if I missed her.

Instead, they told me they were so sorry that I had to go through that.

*

In a later session, the therapist asked me if I could do some sort of craft project to commemorate Emily’s memory. Something with photographs, scrapbook materials. I could ask our friends to help.

When I told her we didn’t really have the same friends, Olivia was not there to shout because she refused to let you meet hers and didn’t want to meet yours. I didn’t tell the therapist about what happened with my book club, or the number of times Jamie and Olivia tag-teamed me to talk about feeling safe at home.

*

Emily’s parents came to pick up some of the things I packed. Her mother said the funeral would be next month, once it got warmer. They set it for the day after my birthday. She said it would still be immediate family only. She asked me if I wanted to come. She didn’t tell us a lot about you, but I know she cared for you very much. All those photos on Instagram. You both look so happy.

She looked up at a photo of us on the wall, from the first pandemic summer when Emily had the idea to go camping. In it, my smile looked forced. I wondered why she’d framed that one. Maybe it was the best she’d been able to get from me.

Emily’s parents left with a station wagon full of boxes and mementos. I took the photo from the wall and laid it facedown on the dresser.

*

When my birthday was two weeks away, Jamie and Olivia signed us up to do an online escape room, where you solve puzzles to unlock yourself from a virtual prison. You used to love this stuff, Olivia said. It’ll be a good distraction. We need you for the logic puzzles.

Jamie, who was calling from the night shift at the wildlife rehabilitation center, didn’t say anything to me directly but turned to the barn owl perched on their leather-covered forearm and said, you’ll know when you’re ready to fly again, buddy.

Olivia texted me to say she was dropping off ice cream, and that I really needed to pick a birthday cake flavor. She planned to deliver cupcakes for Jamie and me on the day of my party so we could eat them simultaneously on our Zoom call. Emily had a legendary rant about how red velvet cake was a scam, a routine that once made Olivia laugh so hard she nearly wet her pants. It was the first time I’d introduced them; I knew they’d hit it off. Emily may have hated my young adult fantasy book group and mocked them so viciously I stopped attending, but she did think Olivia was cool for those first few months

I told her I wanted red velvet.

*

A week later, a dozen tulips emerged out of the newly-thawed ground. I remembered Emily digging there in the fall, her refusing to answer any of my questions. It’s just garden stuff. Jesus, Lee. Does everything have to be an interrogation?

When they bloomed the day before my birthday, they were all dark diva purple.

On my 27th birthday, I wrote the first line of a eulogy. I ate my red cake and leftover pizza with Jamie and Olivia after we successfully busted ourselves out of virtual prison. We tilted bottles of beer towards our laptop cameras and recited our birthday toast - To life! May it be nasty, brutish and LONG!

I laughed with them; it was both real and hollow. We did not talk about Emily. We talked about our college days, when Jamie was on the pre-vet track and I was deep into medieval history, and Olivia was sure she was going to major in Broadway stardom. We stayed on for hours, getting progressively louder and sillier, in-jokes flying. I left the pizza box on the coffee table, the three empty bottles in the sink. By the time we hung up, the apartment felt warmer, as if it had spent the evening filled with real people.

The bathtub had never been big enough to fully fit me, but I turned the taps on anyway. While I was waiting for it to fill, I opened my notebook and read what I’d written:

How will I ever know what it feels like to be good enough without you?

I could imagine Olivia cringing, Jamie shaking their head. I could picture the confusion on Emily’s parents’ faces. But I couldn’t think of anything more honest.

There are so many stones that are always falling.

There was one rosemary-mint bath bomb left in the bag. I dropped it between my knees and watched it disintegrate as the tiny waves rippled towards me, one by one by one.