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I breathed in deeply as the memories washed over me. And it wasn’t until that moment, that I realized I was shaking.
“I’ll see you next year,” I said to him as I turned away on wobbly legs. He would have laughed at me if he knew I spoke to him every year on the anniversary of his death.
Jason didn’t believe in life after death even though he had grown up as a strict Catholic. It had been the religion of his foster parents though, not his own.
I had been shocked when I found the rosary in his belongings. Maybe he had believed in something bigger than himself after all. I couldn’t anymore. I was too angry, too sad, to believe inanythinganymore.
The graveyard wasn’t empty today, I noted as I made my way away from where he was buried. The little girl was long gone as far as I could see, but another family was a few feet from me, standing at a gravesite saying their last goodbyes to someone they had loved.
I wasn’t good at goodbyes. After Jason’s death, I went to a therapist once who told me that acceptance was a stage of grief I would eventually get to. I didn’t believe her.
It had already been two years and Jason’s death felt as fresh as it did when I first buried him. There was nothing to accept. He hadn’t died of old age.
He hadn’t been sick, like my mom. No, he’d been cut down in the prime of his life. Our lives. And it wasn’t fair.
My small sedan sat just across the street. I opened the door and slid behind the wheel. That’s when my phone rang.
Thoughtlessly, I answered.
“Hello?”
“Mya, I’ve been calling you. Are you all right?”
I recognized the voice instantly. It was my husband’s former partner, Luis. They’d been best friends on the force and had practically grown up together.
It had been a long time since I’d heard his voice. Before Jason’s death, he was always at the house and he had tried to be there for me after his death, but I’d withdrawn.
I barely went outside or spoke to anyone anymore. It was as if once Jason died, part of me died with him.
Not that I’d had much of a life before Jason. Up until my senior year in high school, it had just been me and my mom. And then there was just me.
Mom got sick during my junior year. When I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table crying one day after school, all I remembered was dropping my bookbag to the floor, wrapping my arms around her, and waiting anxiously for her to tell me what was wrong.
She was the strong one. She never cried. She never complained.
She always told me that if I wanted something in life, I needed to make it happen. Excuses were for the useless, she would say.
In my mind, she was a walking superhero, a single mom who loved me with a ferocity I couldn’t describe. Everything she did, she did for me.
She worked at a gas station for most of her life getting paid barely above minimum wage, but she made it work. I’d never been hungry. I never felt less than. She made sure of that.
Mom was a fighter who always tried her best.
Pancreatic cancer. Stage four. There was nothing they could do for her. She was gone within three months. My life had spun out of control.
I began taking risks I never would have before her death, hanging out with people who brought out the worst in me. I had even been too much for Jason, who I’d dated all through high school up until that point.
We understood each other. We were both from broken homes.
Jason had lost his parents to a drunk driver, a teen, when he was just a kid. Sadly, Jason and I both became acquainted with the foster system and the neglect it held, though he had to endure it much longer than me.
I started running with some unsavory characters who I met at the group home I found myself in after Mom’s death. A few months later, Jason broke up with me when he found out that I had started stealing just for the thrill of it.
Eventually, he ended up being a cop. He told me it was because he had wanted to help people like me and like him. He even had to bail me out once.
I had been arrested on various charges, shoplifting, drunk and disorderly behavior. I had woken up face down in a jail cell.
Apparently, in a drunken stupor, I had chosen to call him from the station. He was my ex, but he had still shown up. And while I slept it off, he had gotten to know some of the after-hours officers.