Chapter 12
Nina almost didn’t go. She almost didn’t go three separate times.
The first time was a week before, when she read the retreat brochure that Claire had found online. The air left her lungs. It was like it was sucked out by one of those really strong vacuum cleaners she couldn’t afford.
A weekend of guided grief work in a safe, supportive environment, journaling, sharing, and healing. The word healing made her want to close the laptop and drive to Elena’s house and eat as much food as she possibly could without ever thinking about this again.
The second moment was in the morning when she was in her disorganized kitchen, her bag packed, with cold coffee on the counter as she looked out the window at the marsh.
The tide was low, revealing larger mud flats and herons searching the shallows.
The landscape reflected her feelings - exposed and raw.
The tide concealed this, turning it into something beautiful.
Without it, the marsh was merely mud and bones.
Nina had been living without the tide for nearly two years and wasn’t sure she wanted to face a room full of strangers and show them her muddy side.
The third time was in the car, forty-five minutes into the drive to the retreat center just outside Aiken, South Carolina. She turned to Claire in the driver’s seat and said, “I can’t do this.”
Claire just kept driving. She didn’t even flinch. She didn’t argue. She just kept her eyes on the road and her hands on the wheel.
“Okay, you don’t have to.”
From the back seat, Harper said nothing.
“Wait, so you’re not going to talk me into it?”
“Nope,” Claire said. “This one has to be your choice.”
Nina looked out the window. Pine trees, red clay, the Lowcountry giving way to the Midlands, the landscape flattening.
She thought about the pact. She thought about karaoke and them on stage, singing so badly.
She thought about freezing in the Atlantic.
She thought about cooking in Senora Morales’s kitchen.
She thought about the speed dating and Sam’s kind face across the table and about the text she hadn’t answered three days later, saying yes to coffee.
She thought about all the edges she’d stood on in the last several months and all the times she had stepped off of them and survived.
“Keep driving,” she said.
So Claire kept driving.
The retreat center was a former farmhouse that sat on twenty acres of land outside Aiken. It was surrounded by longleaf pines, and there was a stillness that was so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat. It was a beautiful, uncomplicated place.
The farmhouse was white clapboard with a wide front porch and rocking chairs that nobody was sitting in because everybody was sitting inside in a large room that had been set up with folding chairs arranged in a circle.
Everyone was looking at each other, knowing they had a shared wound and weren’t yet sure how to prove they trusted each other.
There were a total of twelve people, including Nina, Claire, and Harper.
The others were strangers to them. There was a man who looked to be in his sixties, with a beard and very gentle eyes, sitting with his hands folded in his lap.
There was a woman about Nina’s age who had short hair and a face that looked like it had been crying recently and would probably cry again soon.
A younger woman, maybe in her early thirties, held her phone like a shield and wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone.
A couple who looked to be in their seventies were sitting side by side but not touching.
The facilitator was a woman named Susie.
She was petite, with silver hair, and had a calm, steady presence.
She wore no jewelry except a thin gold band on her left hand.
Nina noticed it immediately because she still wore hers, too, and she knew what it meant to keep wearing the ring even when there was not a matching one anywhere else in the world.
“Welcome,” Susie said.
She didn’t smile. It wasn’t that kind of a welcome.
They weren’t having a dinner party. It was the kind of welcome that acknowledged you had come here because something terrible had happened to you, and that now you were brave enough to sit in a circle and not pretend otherwise.
It was a welcome to grieve openly and not care if it made anyone else uncomfortable.
“The only rule here is that whatever happens in this room stays in this room. Whatever you feel is allowed and right. Whatever you need to say, you can say it here. And if you don’t want to say anything, well, that’s allowed too.”
Nina sat between Claire and Harper. Claire had her hands folded in her lap the way that she would fold them at PTA meetings. Harper sat with her arms crossed, which was her default position in any room where she felt vulnerable.
They were here because of their pact. Claire and Harper certainly hadn’t lost their spouses.
They had no reason to be at a grief retreat except that they loved Nina.
And the pact said you had to show up, so they had.
Nina had told them they didn’t actually have to come.
They had looked at her as if she had suggested they might just want to stop breathing.
They had chosen to do this whole thing together, and they weren’t going to let her down now.
Grief was something that everyone would experience at some point in their lives.
No one was going to get out of this world without it.
Grief was just love with no place to go.
That had been said many times by many people, and the only people in the world who don’t get the privilege to grieve are the ones who didn’t experience enough love.
So Harper and Claire had come in solidarity with their best friend, knowing that at some point in their lives, if they were lucky enough, they would experience grief because it would mean they had also experienced great love.
This morning was introductions. Each person said their name, who they lost, and how long ago it was. It was terrible, but necessary.
The man with the beard was George. He’d lost his wife, Barbara, three years ago to Alzheimer’s disease. The woman with the short hair was Diana. She had lost her son, who was twenty-four years old, in a car accident just eight months ago. She said almost nothing else, and nobody asked her to.
The younger woman was Keisha. She had lost her mother six months ago, and she was so angry about it that it filled the room. Nina recognized that anger because she’d felt it too in those early months, before the anger burned out like a shooting star and then left just numbness behind.
The couple in their seventies were Frank and Rose. They had lost their grandson to leukemia. He was only seven years old. Rose spoke, and Frank just stared at the floor like he wanted to be swallowed up by the earth.
Then it was Nina’s turn.
“My name is Nina. I lost my husband, David, two years ago. He had a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old.”
She said it simply, the way she had learned to say it without the wobble in her voice. The wobble was still there a little bit, somewhere hiding underneath.
Claire spoke. “I’m Claire, and I’m just here for Nina.”
“I’m Harper, same.”
Susie nodded, and Nina saw several people in the circle look over at Claire and Harper. Maybe they envied them because they weren’t in that room due to losing someone. Or maybe they just wondered who would drive hours on a Saturday to sit in a folding chair in a farmhouse because they loved you.
The morning exercises were structured and careful. Susie guided them through breathing exercises that Nina found surprisingly difficult. Not because breathing was hard, but because being still in a quiet room that was full of grief just made everything feel harder.
She guided them through a visualization where they were asked to picture a place where they felt safe. Nina pictured her kitchen on Edisto at six in the morning with David at the window, coffee in his hand.
She didn’t cry, not during the breathing or the visualization.
She felt tears building behind her eyes, like pressure behind a dam, but she held them back.
Nina’s grief had always been a private thing for her.
She had no plans to change that now. Elena’s grief was a bonfire, but Nina’s was a locked room.
After lunch, Susie gave each of them a notebook and a pen.
“This afternoon, I’d like you to write a letter to the person you lost. Say whatever it is that you need to say, whatever you haven’t said, whatever you’ve been holding onto, afraid to speak. You don’t have to share it with anybody. If you choose to, there will be time this evening.”
Nina looked at the blank page. She had not written a letter to David.
She hadn’t spoken to him out loud either, not in the way people speak to the dead.
Because speaking to David meant acknowledging that he couldn’t speak back.
She talked about him. She said his name.
She told stories. But she did not talk to him, because talking to someone who isn’t there is the loneliest thing a person can do.
She picked up the pen.
Nina wrote for two hours straight. She sat on the farmhouse’s front porch in one of the rocking chairs and just wrote.
Claire and Harper were inside. She could hear them through the open window, their voices low, talking to George and Diana.
They were doing what they always did, showing up for people, trying to be present and useful.
Nina loved them for it, and she needed to be alone for this anyway.
The letter started formally, which was kind of crazy, because she’d never been formal with David in her life.
Dear David, she wrote.
Then she crossed it out and wrote David. Then she crossed that out too, because just his name on the page made her feel like her chest was going to cave in. She sat there with the pen in her hand and crossed out words, staring at her.