How To Say Goodbye

I don't really remember his funeral. It was postponed for several weeks until his older brother, Will, got back from his tour in the Middle East. During that time, I couldn't decide if I wished we could just get it over with or if I could just hold it off indefinitely. Because, maybe if it didn't happen, he didn't die. But it did happen, and it was just as heartbreaking as I thought it would be.

My memories were blurred with the saltiness of my tears, of a day that seemingly never ended and yet was over before I could truly say goodbye. There were too many people: people I didn't know, people I didn't want to see, and others who I needed but couldn't have to myself.

There was one stupid, idiotic thing I couldn't get out of my mind. The priest who officiated Jason's burial kept talking about faith, God's will and timing. It was as if he was saying fate declared that he die then and there and in no other fashion than drowning in the thing that made him feel whole.

And now I knew, life was cruel and unpredictable. Religion was fake. God didn't exist. Jesus, a historical man, lived and died and did not live again. Religion is based on a belief of lies, one cannot believe in God because one cannot believe in something they do not know of. Hope, people hoped that God was real, they hoped Jesus rose again that day, they hoped that there was life after death. Religion is based off of hope and hope is something I don't have, for I was a widow filled with grief after all.

And that's why I was walking up a hill right now, I had no hope and I couldn't get the idea of fate out of my mind. Fate, the word itself tangled deep within me, clawing and spinning. I needed to find out if fate was true. Because if he was fated to die there, maybe I was too.

Dew hung on the plants and tears blotted my flushed cheeks. It was a crisp, late autumn morning in rural Michigan, and the sun was at half peak, its rays scattered across the treetops in a flurry of reflection. Last night, Jack Frost crept in, raking his pale blue fingers over the countryside and as the sun rose he still lingered in the shadows. As I walked, I looked down at my feet, stepping carefully around the roots that crawled above the soil. My shoes were caked in drying mud, but you could still see the fraying blue stitch and scuff marks underneath. Looking up, I saw the abstract shadows of the branches caging me in, the faintest sunlight was peeping in between the gaps, casting a golden glow on the wood.

At that moment, I wondered what it would be like if trees had eyes. All the history they would see, all the untold stories they could whisper if they only had the lips to speak, and all the secrets they could know if they had the ears to hear them. Would they have known that this is where Jason and I first met, as sunkissed children with no knowledge of the terrors around us, or that this is where we first kissed, first made love, where I told him I was pregnant, where he proposed, where I told him I lost the baby, where he died.

I wondered a lot of things, but after Jason's death, I wondered a lot more than I used to. I thought Jason's death was going to be the end of me; I didn't think I could recover from such a loss. My heart felt split and I didn't think I had a strong enough thread to stitch it back together. My friends and family showered me with love and affection, but I felt like I was suffocating under their saddened eyes. I had to get away, I had to find answers that I didn't have to believe in, but answers that made sense. That were true to me. And to him.

Returning to the cliff felt like my only option. I didn't know what was going to happen. I wanted to know if fate was real, and I wanted to know if Jason's fate was mine too. The cliff seemed to have all the answers, or so I wanted it to. This decision wasn't rash or one spurred by the moment, I've thought of this ever since I watched the divers pull out Jason's bloated and blue corpse. But I was scared, I wasn't ready for the truth or the reality of his death then. Two months showed me that I would never be ready, because facing the cliff was the only way I could try to move past his death.