The Stages Of Grief

"Green eyes look back at me filled with tears. An incomprehensive amount of guilt and shame washes through me from the pads of my feet and through my ears. I can hear my heartbeat swimming there. I have seen a lot of hatred in my life. I have never really stayed anywhere too long to see what is on the other end of that feeling. I look at her now, a person that I had loved and known since I was half the size I am now. She stutters over her words, they sound breathy but I can't hear what she is saying over the train wreck in my ears but three words stick out in every other sentence. 'You killed her.' 

Eventually after several shaky breaths I look over at the hospital bed that the love of my life had once laid in. The doctors were staring back at me pulling over the sheets covering her beautiful pale face, her strawberry blonde hair, her beautiful green eyes. The ones painfully in similarity stare back at me, her mothers eyes. I bring myself back into the present and look at Aria again. 'I'm sorry...' I mutter under my breath. She looks at me as if she was surprised that I even had a voice left to give. Ella had always been my voice. 'Doctor, please remove her from this room. I would like to be with my daughter alone.' Aria said not looking at me at all. I felt the hot tears fall to my shirt that I had thrown on. I wiped my tears in shock and confusion as a nurse escorted me gently out of the room. That day in 1982, I lost my girlfriend to the AIDS epidemic. 

I don't know how I got to the funeral but here I am sitting in my car watching the rain fall on this typical Seattle day. I can't get myself to move from my seat. My keys are sitting in the ignition still. The heat is blasting so much that I am sweating through my suit. The one that me and her chose for this day. My hands feel cold and they shake violently. I put them in front of the vent in my car and I can't feel the air that is so violently escaping them. My breath catches in my throat. It feels like my chest is brick and my lungs can't expand enough. My brain begins to static again and the train returns to my ears from the hospital. I don't even hear my car door open and I don't realize that someone is in the car with me until I feel a cold hand on mine. I look over through my tears to find Jessy. Her sister. She squeezes my hand looking at me, trying to smile through her tears but failing. She was the first person to touch me since her death. This was my first stage of grief. She can't be dead right? If her sister doesn't hate me then she isn't really gone. She can come back from this. This is all a dream. I turn the key from the ignition. Wipe the tears from my face not that anyone can tell the difference between the sobs and the rain. I get up from my seat and stand with everyone else. None of this is real anyways.

Floating isn't real and neither is my thoughts that I will go to sleep and see her when I wake up. That stopped last Thursday when they lowered her oak coffin into the ground. We had always joked that she would be buried in a light blue coffin like the sky on the rare days that it didn't rain. Though there was never a day that a cloud wasn't in the sky, she always dreamed for that day to come. It didn't and for that I was angry with the sky. I was angry with myself for ever allowing the sky and the ground that I walk on to move as fast as it did. I didn't want it to be a short walk to school. I wanted to walk through eternity. That small eternity was in hell. People spat at me in the street. The hatred that I had seen in many places before this one, had gathered here today to tell me how angry they were for me taking a beautiful human being from this earth ever so simply. As I walked into the building the stares burned into my skin. I felt my body come alive with something that I can't even describe. A feeling of rage. I saw red that day.

Next thing I know I am sitting in the dean's office. He shared a half sympathetic look with me. One I had seen many times before. "I will let you off this time with a warning because she died just last week but I can't keep doing this for you Nori. She's gone. There is nothing you can do about it now. What was done was done. You knew the risks when you-" he tried to finish that sentence and that is when I shoved his belongings from his desk to the floor. 'I never... I didn't know...' I said before rushing out of his office and out of the building. I could hear him yelling after me but that doesn't matter. None of it did. I was angry at the world. I was angry with him. This was my second stage of grief. I was angry with myself. I killed her over a little bit of fun. In an artistic way. A way that we joked about but not to this extreme. Maybe we skydived at eighty years old, painting the sky with our laughter as we fell without a parachute. Or maybe a tight waisted pink suit accompanied by a beautiful white dress as we jokingly get married in a fairy tail. Only to lose each other by a split earth, lava separating us. As the ground crumbles beneath us, sending us into an orange and yellow death. We would be the next kids book. Only for her to be pricked by a non-magical needle. In a tattoo parlor that I had rented out to get matching tattoos for her eighteenth birthday. Only to sue the man the next week. Not a fairy tale death. Not at 80, but at eighteen. I'm mad at fairy tales. I am angry at art.

I found myself in a church not even four weeks after the incident at school. I've graduated and I was sitting next to my mom. She had one hand on my shoulder and another on her bible. I am praying that god gives her back. I had never stepped foot in a church before this day. Not knowing much about how praying works. My mom tried to demonstrate it while we sat in silence together awaiting an answer that wouldn't come to me in the form of the love that was once here. Bargaining with god, ready to sell my soul to the devil to have her back even for a moment. I sat there until daylight broke. No ending to my prayers. Begging for a change, begging for anything left to give. For her, it was all I had left to give. That was my third stage of grief. The bargain for her. The looks protruded the atmosphere but not my thoughts. I was set on one train, the train that was in my ears that wreaked of disparity. She was my everything. She is my everything. I need a way to fix it.

I woke up a few times with my knees on the floor of that church before the sadness took over my body. Made my bones feel like concrete and my flesh feel like rags. Showering was a foreign concept for me really. Food was no longer appetizing; it seemed more like a chore. I am nauseatingly conscious of everything around me but again, as if I was floating I could do nothing. Paralyzed in what is grief. This was my second to last phase. The non tapering side that resides with you for the rest of your days and that is depression. Other human beings far beyond these parts came to visit me in this time of my life and though I do not remember them all now I do remember how shockingly unaware that they are. Unaware of what I was going through and unaware of what really took the love of my life from this earth. The accusations against me stood widely sexual. Only dwelling me deeper into guilt and the numbness abyss that is dissociation. The questions burned more than their eyes did. I longed for comfort in someone's touch. Anything to show me that I was not a monster. That I was human too. 

One day, like many others, the sun had shined. The beautiful blue that me and Ella had talked about being her final memory was bright in the sky. Though I was still in bed. A mess swimming in my own filth. I had not eaten in days, maybe a week. The smell of cigarettes and fast food still lingered in the air because I refused to leave the house to get rid of it. I felt a wash over me that was more than any shower could ever do. The visitors came that day to harass me as they usually do. Calling me slurs of all kinds, but today I realized that she had come to visit me in the blue sky." I took a step forward where I stood on the stage, "And that folks was my final stage of grief, one I am still working on thirty or so years later." I look at my wrinkled face in the screens around me standing in a wide open field full of grass and flowers. I look up at the sky that shined bluer than any artificial color could ever surmount to. "I tell this story everywhere I go to speak because queer happiness didn't start with the newest generation. We rebuild ourselves off of the people who died during the epidemic, the ones who have died to get us the right to be married, the right to walk hand in hand in the street without being killed. One we still fight for today. Today I am very happy to be standing in the sunshine state. Being with the love of my life. Please buy one of my books that donate to the AIDS cause completely and help give people like my Ella a chance. Thank you." I step down from the stage. Letting myself take a deep breath of the air around me. A tear slips down my cheek as I read the title of my book. "My Ella". I smile brightly, knowing that she is smiling too. 

  

---The End---