Grief Groups

Cemetery

The drops of dew on the blades of grass are one of my favorite things about the cemetery. Of course I only see them after a bender or after turning over a usually short-lived new leaf.

They come in second to the ratio of dead to visitors, That's my favorite.

Grief is a funny thing I've been told. I've yet to find the humor in it.

The whole human experience can be found in a graveyard. Nothing is more human than death and nothing more universal than grief.

I'm interested in the different kinds of grief, The mother who visits her son daily. The widower who greets his wife every Sunday with flowers. The family that fulfill the perfunctory and obligatory one-time service and never visit again.

Some mourn those who they lost. Others mourn what they lost. Some mourn what never was. A select few come by every few months or so to hash out arguments they didn't flesh out in life. My kind of people. I silently cheers to their loss while they kick and cry over a grave.

Flashback

(Alex and Luke are playing video games and drinking beer)

L: What's your favorite number?

A: What kind of fucking question is that?

L: I don't know dude, a dumb one. I know you have a favorite number, what is it?

A: 52

L: Why? Because that's how many weeks there are in a year?

A: It just feels safe in my brain man, I don't know.

L: I get that. Mine's 2. I like that it's divisible by every other number after it...Plus, there's 2 of us.

A: Yeah kid, you and me against the world.

Flashback ends

It wasn't really just the two of us against the world. It was his unrelenting optimism and my unrelenting demons against a world that would eventually reduce us from two to one, and in the end it was just me against everything.

We had just as much in common as we had in differences. We both liked drugs and music and finding a way out of our minds. We lived on different planes though. It was like we were on the same planets but each of ours were tilted away from each other. I think the force of gravity was slightly lesser in his. He always seemed a bit lighter, even when we went through the same experience. The bad stuff would float around him. Close enough he could see it, but never fully pass through him. The bad stuff fully collided into me.

I pour a swig out of my bottle into the grass.

    'Cheers little brother, hope you're making fun of me on the other side.'

I knew he wasn't. If there was another side, he would probably pity me.

That's enough for today.

I glance over to the hill where his headstone was and walk to my car. I light a smoke.

Bob, one of the groundskeepers, sees me and shakes his head, looks down, but doesn't say anything. After five years he's learned its not worth the effort to reprimand me.

It doesn't feel fair that I was the one who wanted to die and he was the one in the ground.

I chuckle. He would tell me that life isn't fair, but he would say it with that little shit eating smirk on his face that implied he knew something I didn't. Joke was on him though, we were listening to underground tracks.

Luke was non-pretentious in a way that made him seem somehow more pretentious. He didn't listen to the deep cuts. He liked the popular shit, the radio plays. If that's their most popular song, there's a reason for it he would say. Still, you could take him to a record store and he would pull the vinyls that impresses the impossible to please pseudo-indies behind the register. He was't doing it for validation which made it all the more obnoxious. He would excitedly play you the record, grinning from ear to ear.

When we were kids he wanted to be an astronaut. I liked to tell him the moon landing was faked. When he was really young I would tell him the moon was made of cheese and I was gonna eat it all before he got there.

Maybe I didn't like the thought of him going so far away. Maybe I'm just an asshole. In either case, I guess I got what I wanted. He would never go to the moon.

There's a diminishing point of return to reminiscing I tell myself before staggering to bed.