where grief grew up
Four months after my best friend from college died, I slept in her childhood bed. On a Friday in late March, Kaylee, a mutual friend, picked me up from Boston Logan Airport and drove us to Nashua, New Hampshire. On the day before what would have been Abbey’s golden birthday, her 23rd, her mom welcomed us into the house that she had grown up in, a New England cottage on over half an acre of land with a sprawling yard.
At the front door of the home, two dogs scurried to greet us, Theo, the yellow lab I had only ever seen in pictures and French Fry, the dark-haired mutt Abbey had rescued in our senior year of college. The once six-pound puppy had since grown into a gangly creature five times its weight with ears that stood up in expression. When brainstorming names for her new addition, a dog she sought out to get for emotional comfort, we made lists of things she loved: Takis, slippers, French fries. French fries prevailed, and so she became French Fry, a black dog that looked like anything but. As I scratched the back of her upright ears, Theo grabbed a stuffed bear and whined, begging for someone to run their hands over his coat.
I had always planned to see the town that Abbey had grown up in, but in different circumstances than this. She begged me to come visit someday, this home and the one on the island in Maine that she had spent her summers on since she was small. Nostalgia seeped from her voice as she reminisced on her times there: July months watching fireworks, mornings on the lake, helping out at the golf club where her mother bartended. She often talked about her favorite restaurants in New Hampshire, an equal blend of disdain and admiration for her small town poking through the memories she relayed. She was always destined for greater things, something both she and everyone in her life knew. It was almost inevitable that she would end up near a big city, and so she settled for a liberal arts school an hour outside of Los Angeles and returned to New England only for holiday breaks. Now I was here, at the backdrop where stories were born, and she was nowhere.
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Cheerleading photos were pinned to a bulletin board next to her bed, stuffed animals lined in a row on top of the undisturbed comforter, jewelry hung from holders on the dresser as though waiting for her to wear them. Two life-size cardboard cutouts, one of Zayn Malik and the other of Harry Styles, reminded me that the girl I knew through her many collegiate phases was once a devoted One Direction fan who had skipped a day of high school with a friend to drive to the city in hopes of seeing the popstars. Her bedroom looked eerily like mine in my own childhood home, outside of Chicago.
That night, her mom, Beth, baked banana bread from scratch as we sat around the kitchen counter talking, reminiscing in ways others were notably too uncomfortable to. Nobody knew how to talk candidly about her absence, it seemed, and we, as did her mom, felt the collective weight of the avoidance.
The next morning, we set up for a party to celebrate with friends and family, to honor the girl who would be unable to join us. I cracked glow sticks from a box filled with decor from birthdays back, fished out of basement storage; Kaylee struggled to blow up balloons without a pump. We moved Zayn and Harry to a spot next to the stairs for a makeshift photobooth, her collection of sunglasses serving the role of accessory. On a dresser nearby, her colorful urn.
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I had seen it before at the visitation before the funeral, a late November day two weeks after her last. I don’t know what I expected to find when I reached the top of the greeting line, but it wasn’t what I had pictured on the red-eye flight there. I had never seen a body, but imagined what hers would look like in a state of infinite rest, contemplating its departed condition. It took me minutes, more than five, in front of the urn to realize what it was. I had never been to a wake; cremation is not in the Jewish tradition. When the realization finally dawned on me, that I was not only standing in front of an altar of her favorite things but also of her, my body led me out of the room.
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The party that night was full of friends and her favorite foods and radiating laughter. We flipped through scrapbooks and clinked neon plastic shot glasses in her honor. A cake that encompassed everything she loved was the centerpiece of the table. The night had been a reunion, a coming together to remember a life that maybe hadn’t realized its weight, its impact, but it was also unsettling, fraught with the very real but now tangible recognition that the girl in the pictures would never again exist outside of them. That night when I fished an Ambien out of my purse to swallow before lying down, I hoped I’d dream of her, or at the very least, hear the phantom hum of her breath on its exhale.
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If you walked through Abbey’s bedroom, rummaged through her belongings, you would see a girl who did everything and anything with an air of dedication that manifested in objects: notebooks, clothing, sneakers. But that’s the catch with belongings and the spaces in which we house them; you only see what is collected and kept. On her made bed, you would not see the months she spent outside of it due to a back injury. You would be unable to see that she slept in another, easier to get into with the pain of a slipped disc. You would not see then, the introduction to prescription opioids that would prove a gateway for someone with a passion for intensity. In her massive collection of sunglasses, you would be unable to detect the sleeplessness in her eyes, the dilated pupils that had become routine, familiar. You would not be able to see in her things, the ache that worsened internally as she healed physically. You would not see me and everyone else close waiting for her to turn around, pull out of it, accept the help she would refuse, but then later accept. The bedroom I was staying in looked untouched, stalled as though waiting for her return someday. The space looked like that of the 9, 10, 11, 16-year-old girl who lived in it. It looked like the Abbey I met my freshman year of college. It didn’t look like the room of someone who would use intravenously, and eventually die from it.
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The thing about grief is that it eats away at memory, your concept of time.
I thought I had gone through all the phases of it in the months after her overdose, when the fact is that at that place in time, I had barely scratched the surface. I thought successfully having emptied out her abandoned storage unit with only a few bouts of concealed tears meant I was okay. While at the front of my conscience, grief may have been pushed aside, physically my body could not deny its heaviness, the toll of its weight. My exhaustion in the months following my trip to the east coast overwhelmed me. Brain fog wiped my capacity for conversation and became normalcy. I poured myself into work because my work didn’t have time to ask how I was feeling; deadlines meant purpose.
Still, my body knew of the absence. At night, when my mind was no longer occupied by theory and writing, there was a vacancy for thoughts to emerge. Scenarios took place without reconcilable end. Questions loomed and never left. How did she overdose at a sober living facility, of all places? Those people were paid to keep her safe. In my own bed at night, I wrestled with rage, guilt, obsession.
I explained to my therapist, the strangeness that surrounds my grief, almost exempt from the timeline, as though I’m stuck in a perpetual amnesia in reference to when things were. I have found myself on more than one occasion, referring to my senior year of college as recent when in reality, years have passed since. My life now exists in two difficult to identify planes instead of years; a time before Abbey and a time after.
As we begin to approach the three-year anniversary of her death, I am met with the knowledge that time does not heal all. If anything, time worsens wounds, the guilt of getting better, a different sort of grief entirely. Time does not heal all; healing only occurs if you want it to, if you let it.
I have managed to work through some of that grief through therapy, EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), and antidepressants. Conversations with Beth, Abbey’s mother, help us both to keep the memories, the memory of her, breathing.
I am not sure what I believe in regard to after-life, and I often find myself questioning what it was that Abbey believed in. Did she believe in ghosts? And if so, is she now one? While I can’t directly articulate what I believe happens after we die, I hold a good amount of belief that what happens in dreams is a sign of some sort. Months ago, I was struck by a dream I had that was so vivid and real-feeling that I woke up in tears. In it, Abbey was there, a rare experience for my subconscious; typically in my dreams, I am still conscious of her absence. In this dream, I was cognizant of the present, but in a place other than, back in time somewhere before the chaos, before the series of events that would lead to her loss. “You have no idea what is going to happen in the next year,” I told her. “But I want you to know that I love you.”
Danielle (she/her/hers) is an MFA alum and professor of disability/queer rhetoric at Chapman University. She has a fear of commitment in regard to novel writing and an affinity for wiener dogs. Her work has been published by Lunch Ticket, Vassar Review, Hobart, Split Lip, Redivider, etc. and is forthcoming in The Florida Review.