Sebastian looked down at his shoes and scuffed one along the floor. “But I guess you’re right—there is more to it than that.”
The burn receded. Maybe my narrative wasn’t so outrageous after all.
“It’s something we kind of have in common.”
“Oh?” Now I was confused.
“It’s my grandmother. We found out a few weeks ago that she’s dying, but nobody in my family wants to talk about it, which is ridiculous, in my opinion.”
For the second time that night, I reluctantly agreed with him—not talking about death only ever made it harder. I felt a sliver of compassion.
“I’m sorry to hear that. It must be tough for you.”
It was as if my guilt for assuming the worst in him somehow shifted his appearance. The combined bookishness of his spectacles and scarf were suddenly quite charming.
“It is.” Sebastian looked at me hopefully. “But I know you can relate, since you just lost your grandmother.”
Guilt continued to clench my abdomen. Between the two of us, I was turning out to be the dishonest one. “Well, um…”
“Anyway,” he said. “I’m really sorry if it seemed like I was following you. I just thought it might be good to talk to someone who’d been through the same thing and it was a really nice surprise to run into you tonight. I live on the Upper West Side so this death café is pretty close to me.”
Dishonesty was one thing, but misleading someone who was grieving a loved one felt cruel.
I took a slow breath. “Actually, Sebastian, my grandmother didn’t die. Well, she did die—both of my grandmothers did—but it was before I was born, so I never met either of them.”
“Oh.” Sebastian rubbed his chin. “Why would you lie about that?”
“Because I don’t really want to talk about what I do for a living.”
“But what does that have to do with going to a death café? No one really mentions their jobs at these things.”
“Yeah, but death kind of is my job.”
“What are you, like, some kind of hit woman?” His nervous tone indicated he was only partly joking.
“No. I’m a death doula.”
“A death doula? Wow, I’ve never heard of that. Sounds kind of ominous.”
I fought off competing emotions. Embarrassment for letting my imagination get carried away and for getting caught in a lie. Empathy for Sebastian and his dying grandmother. Nervousness at the fact that a nice-looking man my age was aware of my presence and looking at me intently. My brain struggled to communicate a coherent sentence to my tongue.
The chiming timer on my phone was my savior.
“I’ve got to go,” I blurted abruptly, slowly placing the last jar of vitamins back on the shelf to avoid another avalanche. “Have a good night.”
“Wait, could we maybe—”
By the time he finished his sentence, I’d already made it through the store’s sliding doors.
13
After a week of grayish cotton wool blanketing the city sky, an infinite stretch of clear blue finally greeted me as I waited to cross Seventh Avenue. I was grateful for the injection of cheer—Sundays still felt gloomy without Grandpa. In the months after he died, I couldn’t bring myself to set foot in the diner. Or the bookstore. Continuing our weekly tradition without him was a taunting reminder that I’d been on the other side of the world enjoying myself when he needed me most. That even if there was nothing I could do to prevent his death, I could have at least spent more time with him before it happened.
I’ve never understood Western society’s warped perception of grief as something quantifiable and finite, a problem to be fixed. Eight months after Grandpa died, my doctor suggested I see a psychiatrist because I was still having trouble accepting he was gone. After only one session, the psychiatrist promptly diagnosed me with “persistent complex bereavement disorder,” aka chronic grief, and suggested I take antidepressants. Turns out, in the opinion of most medical experts, your grieving process shouldn’t last longer than six months. And if you aren’t over it by then, there’s something clinically wrong with you.
What the hell?
It felt callous to be expected to resume life as normal six months after losing someone whose existence had been so indelibly intertwined with yours. There would never be a moment I wouldn’t miss Grandpa. That was one of the reasons I became a death doula—my grief felt more at home in the company of others who were grieving, whether it was loved ones or the dying person themselves grieving a life they knew they could have lived better.
As much as it hurt, I eventually realized that keeping up our diner and bookstore tradition was one of the few ways I could still feel close to Grandpa. Now, every Sunday when I wasn’t working, I ate breakfast alone in our favorite booth at the diner and then walked to the bookstore, his absence as conspicuous as his presence ever was. After more than a decade, the pain had dulled slightly, but my grief hadn’t diminished. It had just taken a different shape.
I pulled my coat tighter and walked the few blocks from the diner, the grease from my French toast lulling my stomach into a false sense of satiation. Two decades of commercial invasion had stripped the surrounding neighborhood of many of its original gems, but Bessie’s bookstore endured. The woman herself, now in her late seventies, remained equally robust—her middle noticeably rounder, her smile as welcoming as ever. And she still tried to tempt me with candy.
“Clover, honey!” Bessie shuffled sideways in the space between two shelves to accommodate her generous girth. “That Georgia O’Keeffe biography you’ve been waiting for is here behind the counter. You sure do love those lonely pioneering women!”
“Thanks, Bessie.” The idea of a solitary life among the mountains and desert of New Mexico definitely had its appeal. “I might just take a quick look around to see what else is new.”
“Be my guest!”
I didn’t need more books, but I liked the rush of dopamine that came from finding a new title to add to my potential reading list. I gave the science section a wide berth, trying not to imagine Grandpa’s tall silhouette perusing its shelves.
Two young men, each of a coltish build, stood browsing the fiction spines between the letters E and K. The shorter leaned his head on the shoulder of the taller, their pinkies casually laced together. I stepped backward quietly, not wanting to intrude on their bubble. Each man would use his free hand to pull out an individual book and skim its blurb, before slotting it back in with the same hand to avoid breaking the pinkie connection that kept them linked. Every so often, one would pass a book to the other, along with a smile and a whisper of “I think you’d like this one.”
I envied their intimacy. The treasure of having someone who knew your taste in books. A shoulder to rest your head on as you browsed.
An emptiness blazed in my heart. I didn’t feel like scouring the shelves for new additions to my reading list anymore.
As I rounded the corner from the bookstore, Georgia O’Keeffe tome under my arm, I thought about the entry I’d selected from my ADVICE notebook that morning from Olive, a cartographer with an endearingly loud laugh and an aggressive melanoma. After making me promise I’d always wear sunscreen (which I have ever since), she added a more surprising piece of advice.
“Whenever I moved to a new city or started a new relationship, I’d always change my perfume,” she’d told me. “That way I’d be able to look back and relive my best memories from that time whenever I smelled it. So whenever you feel a shift or start a new chapter in life, find a new scent to go with it.”