Afterwards

The hardest part about taking care of a person dying inch-by-inch isn't the sleepless nights, the wrenched back from lifting once (or twenty times) too often, or the isolation. The hardest part is afterwards.

****

My mother left when the last of the funeral flowers died. It was all I could do to stand there--my knuckles shoved roughly into my mouth to stifle my hiccoughing sobs--and not dive into the fireplace after her to stagger into her kitchen, soot-blackened and begging her not to leave me alone in my painfully empty house.

****

I've never been one for going out much, and, after, I rarely went out at all, except for the necessary trips to Gringotts and the like. When I did go somewhere, I invariably ran into someone I knew--someone who thought they knew me--and heard those same tired lines that were worse than being ignored.

"I'm sorry about your husband," he'd say gruffly, not quite looking me in the eye. I could almost laugh at this--the last time he 'spoke' to me was in furious, garbled curses because Greg had just insulted his doxy of a wife and broken his jaw.

"Are you all right?" she'd ask gently, with her hand on my arm in what was supposed to be a comforting gesture. All right? No, not really--my twenty-five-year-old husband just died after four excruciating years of slow disintegration. But that wasn't really your question, was it? That was your subtle way of asking, "Is it safe to leave you alone, or should I call St. Mungo's?"

Perhaps the worst, though, was the confidential whisper, "I'm sorry for your loss, but it was a blessing, wasn't it? You must be relieved that it's over." I may be rough and not exactly suited for polite society, but do you really think that I'm so calloused as to be thankful that Greg's dead? I would have traded my life for his, just as he did for me. Believe it or not, I loved (yes, loved) him, and he loved me. Do you imagine that you and your kind have a monopoly on love?

To these I want to spit and rage and cry. How dare you assume? How dare you judge that his life wasn't worth as much, that my grief is somehow less? If you had only bothered to notice, you'd know that helplessly watching the decay of what scraps of his mind and strength he had left did not blunt my pain, but only whetted the knife. For four years, grief and sorrow hovered just behind me, a low, aching throb that scraped my heart raw. When Greg died, these wounds split open with a pain so fierce that I. . . . I. . . .

I cannot say it.

****

Years of routine did not disintegrate overnight, and I kept continuing on as before until something reminded me. I spent weeks forgetting and remembering.

I brewed and bottled a week's worth of his sustaining potion before I remembered.

I thought I heard the unsteady scrape of a chair from the kitchen, and I was halfway out of my own chair before I remembered.

I prepared meals for two and set out two plates, two knives, two spoons, and then I just stood there, gripping two forks and remembering.

When I finally convinced myself to go to bed in the guttering torchlight of the midnight hours, I saw his form in the jumbled pillows on the bed I was too tired to make, until my hand smoothed back only cotton, and I remembered and cried myself to sleep.

He still inhabits my dreams, fitting seamlessly into the disjointed patchwork of my dreamscape--sometimes as the chuckling schoolboy whose nose I broke and whose retaliation I quietly bore in remorse, sometimes as the awkward suitor who mumbled and accidentally cracked my mother's good china, sometimes as the husband who worked too hard and earned too little, sometimes as the inexpert lover who told me I was beautiful, and sometimes as the helpless invalid I bathed, fed, soothed, and clung to, but always alive. Sometimes I dream of Hogwarts, of slouching comfortably by the fire between Greg and Vince, of slow silences shared over tedious essays, of a place and a time where a rising Voldemort gave us about as much worry as the rising damp in our common room.

As the months pass, I find myself thinking of him less and less often. Even so, all it takes is a joke, a scent, a gesture, a pillow in the dark, and I tumble through again into the aching abyss of loss and loneliness.