I felt like a tornado. I’d grown up being afraid of the kind of storms that brought funnel clouds. There’s nothing more terrifying than hiding in a basement, bathtub, or closet wondering if Mother Nature’s enraged thumb would land on your house. Grief kind of felt like that.
My entire body was a maelstrom of funneling emotions that imprisoned me. There was nowhere for them to go. Somewhere inside of me, there was a calm place, a quiet center, the eye of the storm, but I couldn’t find it.
People came and went, but only one presence truly stayed with me. Heathcliff. Mostly, he stood next to me, sometimes kneeling on the floor when I couldn’t stand. At first, he didn’t even attempt to hold me, but then I reached for him. I’m not sure why. In many ways, I didn’t want anyone. I just wanted to hurt, to spend my grief the same way I’d lived my life, with just Gregor and me.
But at some point, I did reach for Heathcliff, and he embraced me, his arms tightening.
“You’re not alone,” he said against my hair.
He never left. He, along with his grandmother, stayed at the plantation with me, their comforting presence surrounding me. Mams made phone calls, talked to the funeral home, and set up things I wouldn’t even have known how to set up. All I had to do was sign papers.
“He had everythin’ lined up,” Mams’ told me that first Gregor-less night. “His insurance covers everything. All you have to do is help me make a few selections and sign a few papers.”
I was getting good at putting my signature on paperwork through a haze of tears.
Vaguely, I remember showering and changing, my heavy, tear-drained body falling onto my bed. Downstairs, people moved around, Heathcliff’s voice mingling with his family’s. They’d taken me under their wings, but all I could do was stare blankly at the window above my window seat, my fist clutching my stomach, my knees drawn up to my chest. The tears made my body too hot for blankets and too cold to be warm.
The light from my window started out dull and full of threats, changing with the day, the gray crawling across the floor, up my walls, and then back across the floor again before being snuffed out by scattered storms. Lightning flashed.
This was grief. This was pain.
Outside, it rained.
“For my sake,” I sobbed. “You’ve got this, Hawthorne. For my sake.”
Downstairs, music played, the sound of Heathcliff’s guitar both sad and healing. He made more mistakes on the instrument than he got right, but it eased the pain some, filling the screaming silence in my head with something more.
“Be brave, Hawthorne,” I told myself.
I wish I could say that I was able to pull myself together, to make it through my uncle’s passing with poise and grace, but there’s a huge difference between knowing you’re going to lose someone and actually experiencing the loss. There was no grace in my tears, no poise in the way I walked, and no beauty in the way I ranted at my walls.
In many ways, I think people need to be angry before they can be accepting. I was angry, so very angry at death and life and people who had the kind of happiness that had been robbed from me. It didn’t matter how unfair that sounded, how selfish it seemed to make me. I was angry, and so I yelled at the invisible people in front of me, blaming my missing parents, happy people I respected, myself, and even Gregor.
I yelled, swore, and punched my bed.
Outside, it rained.
The day of the wake, Heathcliff stood in front of my open bedroom door, his gaze on my sprawled figure.
“It’s okay to fall, Hawthorne,” he said. “Sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom to find the strength to climb back up the mountain.”
Sitting up, I stared at him, my hair even messier than usual, my face swollen, my head pounding from too many tears.
“You don’t know,” I scolded. “You don’t know how it feels.”
He leaned against the open frame. “No, I don’t. I wasn’t very old when I lost my grandfather, and I certainly haven’t lost a parent, but the words sounded good in my head.” His gaze traveled down my rumpled sheets. “I’ll be here to help you though. I may not understand, but I’ll help hold you up while you’re in the process of falling.”
I didn’t think there were any more tears left in me, but a few trickled down my cheeks any way. “I can do this, Heathcliff. I can.”
The smile he gave me was a soft one. “I know you can. For his sake and yours.” He entered the room and offered me his hand. “It’s better to let it all out than to keep it in. Come on, I can’t keep you from stumbling, but I can certainly cushion the fall.”
My tear-filled eyes found his face before falling to his shoes. He had on his sneakers, the old shoes going well somehow with the jeans and dress shirt he wore. It should have clashed, but it didn’t.
Another tear fell. “You have good shoes, you know,” I said.
It amazed me how close I’d become to Heathcliff. All because I’d noticed his shoes, and he’d followed me home from school one day.
“Yours aren’t so bad either,” Heathcliff replied.
There was no more room in my heart for heartbreak. “Can you promise me something?” I asked.
Heathcliff kept his hand held out toward me. “Anything?”