Page 20 of Tides That Bind

My calf muscles ache as I make my way back to him, or I should say, what muscle is left. I feel as gaunt and hollow as I probably look.

“Why not? It’s never this warm in December.”

“It’s January, Mom.”

I freeze. Lucas is right. It’s January. And not the first of January. It’s nearly halfway through the month—Martin Luther King weekend, which means it’s just more than two months since Nate died.

Everyone talks about the firsts that follow losing a loved one.

There was our first Thanksgiving, when I fled to Claire’s for a week.

Our first Christmas and New Year’s, which we also spent with Claire.

The hardest firsts aren’t the major ones. The initial moments that shatter my soul are the everyday ones, like picking up Nate’s dry cleaning he’ll never wear again, or holding that first piece of mail addressed to him. I’ve never cried harder than I did two weeks after the funeral when I couldn’t find the remote to the TV in our bedroom and couldn’t blame Nate for not putting it back in the drawer beneath the console.

But without a doubt, nothing was harder than the first time I went to sleep as a widow, knowing that I’d wake up one too. It was like in just a split second, I became an entirely different person that was the antithesis of my current identity.

I was no longer awife. I was a widow far too soon.

But one thing remained constant.

“Mom?”

I hold my breath, waiting, wondering what the question will be.

Where do you go when you die? How do you get there?

Lucas points to a shovel at my feet. “Can you hand me that?”

My heart sinks, and I hate myself that in the first few days after Nate died, I was frustrated by the sheer amount of questions, frustrated by Lucas's reluctance to just accept his father was dead without any inquiry.

But the questions became less. And now, they hardly come at all.

The first thing I did the night after the funeral was googlewhat to say to your kid when his father diesand order every book on the subject. None of them were helpful. You could take the minds of the greatest child psychologists and go nowhere with all the knowledge. Because some words—your dad diedordaddy isn’t coming home—they’re too hard for little ears to hear and even harder to understand.

At a loss, I spoke with Lucas's school and started having him meet with the guidance counselor twice a week, hoping that she might be better suited to help him than me. His mother. His only parent. In the meantime, all I could do was try to fill Lucas's draining cup up with all the fun things he loves to do. Like go to the beach.

“Will you come get your feet wet with me?” I ask, sighing in defeat when Lucas shakes his head.

I pick up his unused boogie board. “Can I borrow this?”

Tides rises to his feet as I take it, heading toward the water.

“Mom!”

I turn immediately. Lucas stands, shuffling his feet, twisting his little hands. The sight draws me back to him.

“Can you…can you not swim today?”

“Why?”

It’s impossible to ignore the fear in his eyes that is so palpable it steals my breath. With just one look, Lucas reminds me of the most important lesson I’ve learned in the last two months.

Grief never stops taking.

It rips away the closeness of memories we’ve made and the possibility of ones we haven’t yet.

It steals joy from places we used to find it.

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