The Last Poem

Chapter 2 #4

The thing about grief is that it doesn’t care who it targets. It will visit anyone’s doorstep, and, when you open the door, you never know who will walk in, and who might walk out.

That’s why our group wasn’t just for those who had lost someone due to death; it was for anyone carrying the weight of loss in all its forms. Sorrow has many faces, and each of us had been forced to confront one of them.

In addition to Gill, our members included Bobby, whose parents were highly conservative and who hadn’t accepted his sexuality.

Winnie’s husband, Cliff, just up and left one day—no note, no warning, just gone.

Julian was from the next town over; his wife had had five miscarriages and didn’t know he attended.

Emerson, our youngest member, was in a horrific car accident a year ago.

She was left with a broken body and a broken heart.

Rita’s sister had dementia and most days didn’t recognize her.

Olivia, our town reporter, joined from time to time but stayed mostly silent.

Her mother, our nightly news anchor, died of a brain aneurysm three days shy of her sixtieth birthday.

And then there was me, still trying to navigate a world that felt incomplete.

We were a motley crew, and our first meetings had been awkward, with all of us unsure how to share our pain without stepping on someone else’s.

But over time, we relaxed, and the group became a rare place where we could be vulnerable without fear of judgment.

No matter what heartache we brought to the table, we all understood its weight, and that each of us had a seat.

As I stole a glance at my watch, Max breezed through the door in his usual cashmere sweater and thin-framed glasses. He eyed the moose head on the wall suspiciously, then strode over and perched on a barstool with us.

When everyone was settled, and those who’d grabbed a drink had been served, Max looked up.

“Shall we begin?” he said, crossing his legs. “How is everyone?”

There was a low murmur in response before Julian’s voice cut through.

“My daughter had her first ballet recital this week,” he said. “I cried halfway through.”

I smiled, shifting on my barstool. It wasn’t as comfortable as a library armchair, but it would do.

Max looked at Julian, his eyes kind. “That sounds fun. Anything else interesting about your week?”

Julian was from Norvale, about thirty minutes north of Everston.

It was a much bigger town, sprawling through the valley, with chain supermarkets, shopping plazas, and a steady stream of traffic weaving between the mountains that framed its edges.

He had a daughter, Hazel, and a son, Miles, but he and his wife, Cara, had been trying to conceive another child for years, a journey marred with pain.

In our last meeting, Julian mentioned that he told his wife he was working extra night shifts, because he didn’t know how to tell her that instead he was driving to Everston for these meetings.

He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he was suffering, too, in a different way.

Julian cleared his throat.

“I worked a lot this week. Sometimes it’s easier to be at work than it is to be at home, but I feel guilty for that,” he said.

“Why do you feel guilty?”

“Because it’s difficult to grieve for a baby I’ve never met, and I can’t tell my wife because she’s in so much pain.”

“That doesn’t make your pain any less real, Julian,” Bobby said quietly.

“It just doesn’t feel real,” Julian continued.

“My wife, you know, she can barely eat, barely sleep, barely get out of bed, she cries all night long, she says the names we had picked out for the babies over and over again. But me?” he drew in a breath.

“I just go about my day trying to get from one thing to the next. As though the baby never existed. How—how is that not the most horrible thing you ever heard?”

“Regardless of the loss we face, and even if that loss is shared with another, we all still mourn in different ways. Your own experience is valid,” Max said, then gestured toward Gill. “Gill, what was the first thing you did after Edith passed?”

Gill thought for a moment. “I was angry. I remember going inside the shed in my backyard and screaming at the walls for hours.”

“And you, Bobby? What do you do every time you think about your parents?”

“I cry,” Bobby said. “And then I watch Titanic.”

“I cut up photos of my ex or I blast some music,” Emerson offered. Max nodded, slightly amused.

“Winnie?”

“I read a lot when Cliff left to distract myself. It worked sometimes,” she said.

“I did a seven-mile hike and cursed at every tree on the way back,” I said, shrugging lightly.

“You see, our experiences with grief are ever-changing. They can look wildly different from person to person, or sometimes they can look very similar. Just because your grief looks different from your wife’s grief does not make you a monster, Julian,” Max said.

Julian bowed his head and studied his hands in his lap. “I can’t argue with that.”

“Henry, how was your week?” Max asked, giving me a thoughtful look.

I adjusted my glasses, pushed them up the bridge of my nose.

“Well, nothing out of the ordinary, although Imagination Week isn’t too far off, so I’m starting to look into ideas for it.”

“Oh, Imagination Week!” Winnie interjected. “My neighbors’ kids are so excited for it. Their mom’s already started on their costumes.”

“Ah, that’s wonderful!” I replied. “Do you know if they enjoy lemon poppy seed cupcakes?”

Max diplomatically cleared his throat and I straightened on my stool.

“It sounds exciting,” he interjected. “Did Jacob ever attend any library events with you?”

I nodded. “Yes, all the time. He had a special affinity for books, and he always wanted to work in publishing.”

Max shifted and crossed his other leg. “Do you find these events difficult without him?”

I deflected. “Actually, I received a phone call this week, someone asking after Jacob. An old colleague of his who didn’t know of his passing. I had to tell her he was no longer with us.”

“And how did she respond?”

“Well, she said that Jacob will always be with us.”

Emerson groaned loudly. “I hate it when people fucking say that.” Winnie clucked and Emerson turned red. “I mean, I don’t like it when people say that.”

I hid a small smile. I hadn’t expected Winnie and Emerson to have grown so close in such a short amount of time, but I supposed that loss connects us to people we otherwise may have never known.

Max was unfazed. “Why does it bother us?”

When no one answered, I said, “Well, because that’s half the problem, isn’t it? My brother isn’t with me. He’s gone, and I need to accept that.”

When I would first wake up in the morning, still groggy, I would sometimes forget that he had died, the knowledge having not yet kicked me in the gut.

I could almost convince myself that he was just away on vacation, and any minute he would turn up on my doorstep, and grouse at me for not going to the gym more often.

Jacob and I were like night and day. He was supremely confident, and I was utterly reserved.

He liked beer; I enjoyed a nice brandy. He liked football, hockey, baseball, hiking, parasailing, and bungee jumping.

I liked reading, old movies, sudoku, baking, and antique stores.

We were not identical twins, but when Jacob kept his hair short and had forgotten to do laundry and needed to borrow my clothes, people would sometimes mistake him for me.

No matter how different we were, we were still each other’s other half.

Jacob always knew what I was thinking before I’d even say it.

We would finish each other’s sentences, and, despite his need to always be right and to challenge me at every opportunity he got, he would always follow up with a smile, and say, “I never doubted you.” I knew when Jacob was near, even if I hadn’t yet caught sight of him—we had our own language.

So how could I have not known that the other half of me was so sick?

The thought lingered with me, a heavy guilt I had yet to be able to resolve, as our group session wound to a close.

We ended with tea and a poetry reading, as usual, though Sasha didn’t have an electric kettle, so she used the espresso machine.

I swear it tasted faintly of coffee. Not ideal.

This week it was Bobby’s turn to choose, and he picked a poem by Maya Angelou.

As he read about great trees falling, I thought of Jacob and what kind of tree he would be.

Probably a redwood. He was always the strongest and tallest in the room.

“No Olivia tonight?” Rita asked, pouring hot water into a mug and dunking her teabag, staining the water.

I glanced at the door momentarily, thinking perhaps Olivia would arrive late in a flurry of golden hair, cheeks flushed from the report she had been chasing for the day.

I shrugged. “Not tonight, I guess. But there’s always next session.”

“I worry for that girl,” Rita said. “All the pressure the station puts on her, trying to fill her mother’s shoes. And you know”—she glanced around conspiratorially—“the last I heard she was seen kissing Sally Aslop!”

I peered at Rita through my glasses. “Rita, we don’t meet here for gossip…”

“But did you know, Sally Aslop is married to the pastor in Norvale! My church ladies told me all about—”

I poured some sweetener into Rita’s mug: two Splendas. I’d memorized everyone’s order by now.

“It’s none of our business,” I said gently, handing her the mug. “Besides, didn’t Max just remind us to give people space?”

Rita pursed her lips and looked down at her mug, stirring it absently. For a moment, I could see her as a little girl, caught sneaking an extra cookie before dinner, embarrassed to be chided by an adult.

“Everyone deals with things in their own way,” I added with a small shrug. “Maybe instead of guessing, we just hope Olivia turns up next time. She’ll feel more welcome that way.”

“Of course,” Rita said softly, her voice trailing off. “I just miss…”

For as long as I could remember, when I rode my bike home from school as a kid, I would see Rita and her sister Martha on their front porch, cups of tea between them, gleefully gossiping about the neighbors.

These days, Martha stared out of the window from inside a nursing home, and never said a word.

Rita’s eyes went misty. “It doesn’t matter how many years I have lived, Henry, life is always hard when it takes a turn.”

“I know. Believe me, I know.”

“Goodnight,” Max called out to the others who were slowly departing, bidding each other well until the next time. He stopped and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll email you, Henry,” he said lightly; I knew he was referring to the invoice for tonight’s session.

“Great! See you in two weeks,” I said.

He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but then he just smiled and followed the others out into the cool Everston evening.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, startling me.

Henry, sorry to take so long. Had trouble sourcing piping. Can get shipment in a few weeks. Sorry, big job at the old house off Ducks Crossing Road taking up my time. Kyle

A shipment in a few weeks? How was I going to last that long? I was busy trying to find a polite way to ask Kyle if he could bump the library up the priority list when Bobby distracted me.

“Hey, Henry, are we meeting at Brandy’s or at the library next time?”

“Here,” I said, sighing softly. “But we’ll be back at the library in no time…I hope.”

The stragglers disappeared into the night and I returned the stools to their original places.

“I could have packed those away. Come have a drink,” Sasha said from behind the bar.

I leaned on the oak. It was getting late, but I wouldn’t turn down a drink. Sasha clinked down two tumblers in front of us and poured us each a glass of brandy.

“You look like hell, Briggs,” she said.

“I feel like hell,” I said, raising my tumbler to Sasha and taking a burning sip.

“You think it helps, all that talking?”

“Well, I think the alternative, at least for most of us, would be much worse.”

“You know, a little birdie told me that the library pays for these sessions because it received some sort of mental health initiative from the state,” Sasha said, arching an eyebrow. “How very generous of the government.”

I sighed, swirling the last of my brandy in the glass. “Was the little birdie Gill?”

“Sure was. On a pension, having free grief counseling sessions goes a long way,” she replied, her voice light but her expression sharp. “Although, really, does anything in this world come for free?”

I froze. Busted.

“Please don’t say anything,” I muttered, avoiding her gaze.

Sasha shook her head. “I would never. I think it’s honorable what you’re doing, Henry. Truly. But I am worried about you. Six people in the group already, and you’re talking about adding more? That’s a lot to take on. And let’s be honest, librarians aren’t exactly rolling in cash.”

I managed a small smile and finished my brandy, setting the glass down with a quiet clink.

“Thanks for the drink, Sasha. And the space.”

With that, I said no more, leaving Sasha staring after me, her concern etched into every line of her face.

She didn’t understand, and maybe she never would.

This wasn’t just about generosity or kindness—it was something I had to do.

I couldn’t save Jacob. I couldn’t stop the cancer, no matter how many specialists I called, how many treatments we tried, or how much money I spent.

But I could save this group. I could make sure no one felt alone, no one felt like they had to carry the grief in silence.

Hiring Max and hosting small sessions in the library had worked for these people.

If the sessions weren’t “free,” most of them wouldn’t come, and how could they?

Gill’s pension barely covered his rent at the retirement home.

Rita’s savings went into her sister’s care.

Emerson and her mom were drowning in medical bills.

If there were a price tag, they’d walk away.

I felt like I was doing something, and I wanted to do more: welcome more people, create more groups with other counselors.

But the truth was, even I had limits. My life savings wouldn’t last forever.

I needed a plan and, though it wasn’t fully formed, I was working on it.

I’d have to convince this group of people, who already found talking about their grief almost impossible, to share their stories with strangers.

It wouldn’t be easy, but if I could convince them, it could mean a future for these sessions.

A future for them—and maybe, in some way, a future for me too.