by Sarah Kilch Gaffney

Yours was not my first death, my grandfather’s heart having stopped a year or two before (my algebra teacher approaching me in study hall, face grim), nor my most significant (scattering my husband’s ashes on a rocky, northern beach with my three-year-old), but your death stays with me: I was maybe 16, you slightly older, and I think it was the summer I spiral fractured my finger on the soccer field, little metal pins holding the shattered bones in place, and I worked as a bus girl at the local inn, balancing the bread basket on my elbow-high cast as I served wealthy tourists and well-to-do locals, and they all kept asking me how I broke my arm, but it was my pinkie finger, and then the tourists asked what college I was attending, and I lit up at being thought older, and the bartender, also now long dead, or maybe it was the other one, would sometimes make me a ginger ale and crème de cassis, as he did, perhaps, the night you died, a bullet by your own hand, word spreading like fire through the inn’s dining room and our tiny town, and that evening, the sun set over the sea like it always does, the light lingering but everything sharply different, and even your death never prepared me for so many blue skies awash with loss, the lingering sting of salt, how we still have to move through the rest of our days, and how eventually we learn to carry all of our dead—in pockets and papers, tattoos and pen scratches, gathered in our arms as best we can.

Sarah Kilch Gaffney is a writer, brain injury advocate, and homemade caramel aficionado living in Maine. You can find her work at sarahkilchgaffney.com.