I remember reading a quote once that grief is patient as you try to avoid it, but that makes for a messy waiting room. I’m sorry there’s no way to successfully outmaneuver this.

I reread Dr. Keating’s words as tears slid down my face, hot and silent. My husband has been gone for over a year now. The numbness left by his sudden death gradually sloughed off, but the days since roused flashes of grief and regret and anger, which leave me breathless and small. Bingeing and lethargy and self-pity offer relief, but results are fleeting and instead added more regret onto the pile I already struggle to carry. I surveyed my surroundings, seeing depression in the pile of unopened mail, cluttered table tops and empty boxes whose contents failed to buy me comfort. But I walked by, uninterested in tidying up a life I never wanted. Small bits of Us have been drifting away, and now, without my other half, it’s just Me.

I made my way to the front porch and sat in an old rocker, staring across the wooded hillside in front of me, vibrantly green and alive. John should be alive too, a small voice taunts, and my reddened eyes start to fill again. Stop crying, I scold myseIf, and wiped at my face with my sleeve. I stopped as an image shivered in front of me, a pale watercolor of a young woman in a colonial era gown, her face somehow familiar.

“Marie?” I asked.

She nodded, then turned toward the windows. “There is much here that has the look of Harrington Manor,” she finally said, her voice faint. She gestured toward the hillside. “Plenty of green.” She took a seat in the chair beside me, and our silence slowly spooled over the muted caws of crows and buzz of insects.

“Why are you here?” I finally asked.

She gave me a melancholy smile. “John Harrington has been gone since you wrote his death many years ago. Now your John is gone as well. Your pain…” She paused. “It echos in our world. But I do not feel it. Here.” She pressed a translucent hand to her chest and sighed, a soft whisper of breath. “I know the love and happiness, the anger, the joy, the hurt, and the contentment of being John Harrington’s wife, and I feel it, deeply. But I do not feel grief. You wrote me as stoic and strong and angry when he is killed, but I am never as you are now…” She searched my face. “Broken.”

Tears run fresh along the dried salty lines on my face. “I couldn’t imagine life without him. And I didn’t want to.” I force the confession past a swollen tangle in my throat.

She rose from her chair and stood in front of me before grabbing my hands, her touch faint and cool. She dropped to her knees, and her gown ballooned around her with a feathery whisper. “I come here today as others have, to ask that you finish our story. But I ask for selfish reasons.” The grip on my hands tightened. “I know your thoughts and hear your pain. I ask that you finish our story so I may truly know my grief.”

“You don’t know what you ask,” I said, shaking my head. “No one would want this.”

“I do. Without it, I am just a sketch, underwritten, and a shadow of what I should be.” She smiled at me. “Great grief is the cost of knowing great love, is it not? Your pain is as deep as the love for your John. You wrote John Harrington based on him. Shouldn’t my grief be twined with yours?”

I was silent, my thoughts tumbling. “Those words refused to come before he died,” I finally choke out. “I’m not sure I want them to come now.”

“Sometimes we are at our best when we are at our worst.” She shook our clutched hands. “Allow me to feel what I know you feel. Make me relive each memory of him until they are darkened by the thought that there are no more memories to be made.” Her voice grew. “Allow me to feel grief’s grip and have its anguish tear its way from my throat with screams and howls and tears until there is naught but moaning left in me.”

I gasped, her words an echo of my own tortured existence.

“Make my nights endless as the cluttered chaos of my mind grows heavy with regret and loneliness while the empty space at my side taunts me.” Her voice grew urgent. “I want to cry with the realization that his scent has disappeared from his pillow and the fear of forgetting him altogether blooms in my chest and strangles what is left of my heart.” Her voice broke. “Allow me to turn away at the sight of couples, happy in their love, afraid my envy will show for all to see.” Her lips tilted into a sad smile. “Allow me to cry, all the time, mourning my love.” She stopped, dropping my hands to bring hers up to my face, cradling it between her palms. “And then,” she said, her words strong and her eyes steady on mine, “allow me to go about my day until grief should choose to visit again.” She rose then, pulling me up with her before gathering me into an embrace.

I started to sob, and all my thoughts and fears and anger and grief poured out. She gave an agonized cry, bending almost in two with the weight of it all, and she began to cry too, her sobs joining mine in a duet of despair and sorrow.

We stood like that for several minutes, until, at last, I pulled away. I blinked as I took her in, her image no longer faint and opaque but solid, her mahogany colored hair shining in the sunlight and the blue of her gown dazzling in its brightness. Her brown eyes studied me, keen and sharp, but dimmed with sadness.

“You are just as I imagined,” I told her.

She grabbed my shoulders, her grip solid, yet gentle. “Finish it. Let our Johns live again with each reading of your story. Promise me, even as the world and your grief press upon you, write. Until the story is told.”

I nodded and watched as she slowly faded away.

I sat down then and opened my laptop. My fingers curled over the keys, uncertain and waiting, until at last one word stumbled on-screen. Then another. And another. Imperfect words staggering into a string of sentences, flawed and unrefined, until at last I found my voice and bits of Our Story, mine and John’s, began to slowly weave themselves into the story of Harrington Manor. And I smiled.