Two nights after I found out she died, Alissa visited in a dream. For the first part she was in a car with me where hilarity and mayhem resumed. We were laughing like we always did, in a way that we could not laugh with anyone else, and it was so much richer because of it. Then the fun was over, and over much too fast. The last part was when everything went suddenly still and somber. I found her in the front seat looking straight back at me, her eyes burning into mine and trying to convey something that I couldn’t get. She stared so seriously, so intently, and it felt so real. I couldn’t speak, and didn’t know what I should do. I still don’t.
I don’t know if her keenly analytical mind would attribute her appearance in the dream to the simple fact that she had been on my mind all day or if her whimsical side would indulge in the possibility of a visit from wherever she was. It doesn’t matter – I realized what her brother had alluded to in his last message – Alissa was still here with us, inside each of us, and all that we once shared we will continue to share even if she is no longer physically here. It was a small comfort but a comfort nonetheless.
As the days passed and realization that she was gone began to sink in- grief is woefully tricky that way, especially when you don’t see someone but for once a year, if that – my despondency was checked by her brother’s reassuring idea that she did live on within each of us.
Still, when I was in Boston for the first time after her death, I was not prepared for the wave of memories and sadness that washed over the warm amber floors of the condo. Where we had toasted so many happy events over the last twenty years – graduations and parties and sleep-overs and birthdays and Christmases – and those nights when it was just the two of us, when one or both of us had been too scared and too proud to call anyone else to say that we might actually be lonely. We didn’t need to say it. We just pulled out an extra set of sheets and some pillows and got through the night together.
In the silence of the empty condo, I light a candle with a box of matches she had given to me a couple of Christmas holidays ago. Like all of her gifts, it was a piece of art in itself, covered by an artistic scientific rendering of a pair of bees. On the marble table in the middle of the room was a red ceramic bowl, and inside the bowl was the note Alissa had attached to the Christmas gift she and Sophia had given to me last year. When I saw her handwriting, my heart caught in my chest. She had been there, right where I was standing, less than a year ago. We had no reason to believe she wouldn’t be there again, and part of me still couldn’t quite believe it. Even though I know it’s true, and my brain understands and comprehends that she will never be with us again, still I feel that she is present. Part of me will always feel that she is merely halfway around the world, still reading and studying and working. Still raising her daughter and finding her path, still seeking and searching for love, still living out her life in her own way… and then, briefly, I begin to cry.
Boston will be different from this point forward, and in a year filled with difficult changes, this may be one of the saddest. I put the box of matches away and place the note on the fireplace mantle. When everyone gathers a few days later for the Children’s Holiday Hour, it is for the most part a happy occasion, mainly because we don’t talk about it. I am still not ready for that, still not ready to process or think about what we have lost. I occupy myself with my niece and nephew, who unknowingly carve out a space of salvation so that I can safely navigate us through the weekend.
The bluster and havoc of the holidays is difficult enough distraction, and maybe a distraction is exactly what I need to keep me just off-balance enough to not be completely destroyed. When that is over, and when the silence of early January descends, and there is no snow to buffer the darkness, I begin to work through the grief.
In our home we have many vases. It’s not unusual for us to fill a number of them at one time, especially in the spring and summer. But only one of these can be considered a favorite, and it’s the one Alissa gave us for our wedding. No matter what the happy occasion, this is the vase that gets filled with flowers first. This is one of the many objects that will remind me of Alissa. This is what we will fill with flowers again, when the spring comes back and when the summer returns, and we can remember all that we once shared together. An end to new memories is not an end of old ones – it only emboldens them. I hold onto this and hope that it will be enough.
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