UMLÄUT 2020 - THE PANDEMIC ISSUE
GRIEVE
Jessica Schott-Rosenfield
She told me she needed to grieve, wearing a cowboy hat and sitting dead center of a parking lot. I figured I’d listen, the hat said county sheriff with a little brass star, and her face was streaked with something that looked like tears. “Was on Christmas Eve last year,” she said, “when it all started.” I frowned real subtly, then coughed to cover it up. I hate Christmas. I stood there wrapped in my cotton blend trench coat and feeling every gust of wind whip up my collar, like even the weather wanted to make this moment as sharp as possible. She made a husky sound in the back of her throat and I was tempted to ask if she wanted water. But then I remembered a book I had picked up at a second-hand shop, titled Second-Hand Grief. It grabbed my attention, and I stole it, thieved like a low-down criminal. Give space, not chase, the space needed for healing to take place, it had said. The words echoed in my head, thin and eerily, as if they were trying to shriek over the slicing of the wind and make the journey from my head to my body as quickly as they could. I didn’t even realize that the phrase rhymed until years later when I described the incident to my grandchildren and they giggled over the nursery rhyme quality of its meter. On that night they kept repeating, over and over until I asked myself why, why did they think they were so important, so self-obsessed that they had granted themselves free reign of my thoughts? There must have been a reason, some cosmic reminder. I stiffly obeyed, backing away from her, legs weak and numb after being battered by gales for a time. The lights of the pub were warm and tempting. I reentered the safe haven among wafts of cigarette smoke, breathing them gladly in place of the air outside, and didn’t even mind the hacking coughs that escaped my throat; anything was preferable to the bite and snap of what I had played up enough in my head to be a hurricane by now. She stayed outside, but had clearly noticed I was gone. Her body turned around and around, searching for me and my trench coat, looking like a poor blind bunny in the cold. I leaned my head against a window and observed, secure in the book’s decision.