I’VE CRIED AND CRIED, BUT I DON’T FEEL LIKE I’VE EVEN gotten below the surface of it. It’s like I’m skating on a frozen lake, with no idea how deep the water underneath the ice goes, or how cold it is, waiting for it to crack and for me to plunge in. I don’t have the energy to talk to anybody or to write. The only thing I’ve done in the past few days is look up the Kübler-Ross model and discover, to my disappointment, that Kübler-Ross is one person, whereas I’d always pictured that Kübler and Ross were two lifelong best friends until Kübler passed away in a freak umlaut accident and Ross was left bereft on his knees, screaming, “KüBLERRRRR!” And eventually he got it together and put his grief to good use by coming up with those stages.
Apparently when you show up to school for a week straight wearing pajamas and your unwashed hair in a topknot that bats might fly out of any moment, people get concerned. At some point, I spent one of these free-floating chunks of disoriented time in the hot seat in Mr. Barnhill’s perpetually burned-coffee-smelling office, where they plop down the cutters and potential bomb threat–makers to get to the bottom of how serious it is. Like you’re in a film noir movie with one swinging overhead light, except instead of the murder of an aspiring showgirl who got mixed up with Peter Lorre, it’s feelings.
“. . . learned recently that you’ve had a loss,” Mr. Barnhill is saying. Of hearing, I wish. But I nod a little, the minimum required for him not to send me to the principal’s office for lack of participation.
“How are you feeling?”
He appears to be wondering what the most sensitive way to approach death with a student while eating a cruller might be.
“Fine,” I hear myself reply.
He bites into the cruller, pauses, then gingerly puts it back down on a napkin.
“There have been concerns from some of your teachers—when they ask you questions, you don’t hear them. That you seem to be preoccupied lately.”
Not one class here has ever occupied me, I think.
“In any case.” Mr. Barnhill rises and brushes some cruller crumbs off his oxford shirt. “There’s some literature that I’d like you to glance over.”
Mr. Barnhill sidles over to the table near the sofa where the cutters usually wait to speak with him and pulls four pamphlets out of clear plastic displays, stacking them in a pile. He hands them to me. The one on the top has a glossy photo of a sad eleven-year-old boy on the front flap and reads, “The Grieving Child in the Classroom.” Underneath those, I can only assume, are the STD pamphlets students usually walk out with.
But even after that, he keeps looking at me for a long time. I realize, to my surprise, he is truly concerned. He might be a good guidance counselor; I just haven’t noticed until now. Or maybe I don’t have the energy to keep feeling like everyone’s lame, and the curtain I’ve always looked through has fallen down.
“Look, I know these are really cheesy,” he says. “But they can be helpful if you’ve never had a death in the family.”
I tried that, I want to say, but speaking doesn’t seem worth the effort.
I haven’t been able to sleep a lot, and last night at three A.M., I hopped on my computer, Googled a lot of articles about grief, and skimmed the first couple of pages blankly. Then I clicked farther down in the results. Nothing seemed specific enough—and, I realized, nothing will. There is no Dear Sugar on how to deal with the fact that your dad would sell you into human trafficking for a New Yorker byline, or how to recover from the long, painful death of the nonrelated seventy-three-year-old retired lesbian feminist professor across the street who made you buy her weed.
And, even worse, somewhere around page twenty-two of the Google search results for grief advice, I began to suspect that no matter where I go after high school, my problems will never be “relatable” page-one Google-search problems. That they will in fact continue to narrow down to a tiny, sparkling pinprick that nobody can see but me.
Ruth at least should have stuck around to see her garden grow back in.
I keep thinking of it that way, like: She should’ve hung out a little longer or She shouldn’t have bailed because. I know rationally that it wasn’t her choice—that after years of fighting, she was lying in a hospital bed with her body failing even though her mind still wasn’t ready—but it’s easier to think of it like she got a little too high and slipped out of a party early without saying goodbye to anybody.
I’ve been sitting on her porch for a few hours now, gazing out at the bright paved street, half hoping that at any second the screen door will slam and she’ll come out in suspenders and a white oxford, talking smack about the sex life of a woman who cut her off on the Superfresh line. I never got to tell her how much she meant to me. But even if I had the chance, I wouldn’t know how to explain it. It was too long and too complicated. I would have just made jokes until she gave me a knowing, chastising look that said I was hiding behind cleverness.
“Hello. Are you Scarlett?”
I glance up to find a woman in her seventies standing over me, wearing a modest floral dress and fleece, her hair henna red.
“Hi. Yeah.” I stand and shake her hand.
“I’m Sally. Ruth’s friend. I spoke with your mom on the phone when she—”
“I remember.”
I want to ask Sally whether she tried to change Ruth’s mind when she made the choice to stop treatment. Although once Ruth was set on something, the idea of anyone trying to change it was laughable.
“I’m out here from California, just for a few weeks. I’m making the arrangements.”
“I see.”