Grief: A Season of Lasts

Other than some Facebook posts, this is the first piece I wrote after Jim died. I originally posted it in January 2019 in a short story challenge. It’s a hybrid between memoir and fiction, as it’s in third person and the conversation between the nieces is embellished. Everthing else is true. Prompt: “No one can know” | Required word count: 1500

All the phone calls had been made, and people would be arriving soon. In fact, there had already been one text from a friend saying his wife was on the way. Kathy hadn’t yet showered but she’d gotten dressed and as she always did when people were coming, she’d started dusting shelves and tabletops in the living room. Whiffing the feather duster around Jim’s latest handmade Christmas decoration, a toy locomotive, her mind wandered back to a conversation she’d overheard while she was dusting around the seashells and shorebird decoys in their island house earlier in the year.

Ah, the revelatory gleam in a 17-year-old girl’s eye when she discovers a cosmic truth. It can only happen when she is in a safe, comfortable place, away from the world that demands she be jaded, street-smart, and too-cool-for-school.

Noticing the sparkling eyes and animated smiles of her nieces out on the back deck, Kathy had lingered with the duster longer than necessary at the shelves next to the French doors.

“It’s so weird when you get your last toy,” Emma was saying.

“It is,” said Blaine. “Like you can never know it’s the last Christmas you’ll get toys.”

“It might not even be Christmas. You might be in a store with your Mom, and she buys you a toy, and you don’t know at the time but it’s the last one before you are too old for toys.”

“It’s kinda sad, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

Kathy had smiled at the time, recollecting a phone conversation with her best friend one afternoon 40ish years ago when they were both 17.

“Isn’t it so weird that we’re in our houses now, and in a few hours, we’ll be in the bleachers at the basketball game?”

“Yeah, and when we’re there it will feel like we were always there, and—”

“When we are back in our houses it will feel like we never left!”

“So weird.”

When you’re 17, cosmic truths are always so weird.

Now, waiting for friends and family to arrive at their house up north— the one they had bought when they’d married 26 years ago—Kathy reflected on the three winters they had spent down south, on the island. When they were there, it felt like they were always there. Then, when they went back north after 105 days, the island time seemed like a dream that never really happened.

They had vacationed on the island, in a rental house, four years ago. By the end of the week, it felt like home and they started following real estate listings right away. They returned on their house-hunting trip less than a year later, just a few weeks before Kathy finally followed Jim into retirement.

“Do you think we’ll like the island as much as we did on vacation?” Kathy had asked on the plane ride down.

“Why wouldn’t we? I just hope there’s a decent house in our price range.”

“Do you really think we should buy so soon?”

“Why should we wait? We’re not getting any younger. Let’s do it while we still have time to enjoy it.” Twenty years earlier, Jim’s father had died less than two years after buying a long dreamt-of second home on the coast. Jim said he didn’t want to follow in those footsteps and wait until it was almost too late. Kathy empathized; neither of her parents had lived to 70. She was always grateful her father had retired early, giving them several happy years in Florida.

Kathy and Jim fell in love with the very first house they saw, and still felt the same way after a day and a half of inspecting a dozen more. They would spend winters on the island for a few years while they reduced possessions and prepared the house up north for sale. They hoped to live on the island year-round within 5 or 10 years. That was the original plan.

It was at the island house that Kathy had overheard her nieces talking about the last toy. If she had been part of the conversation, instead of eavesdropping, she might have told the girls maybe neither of them had gotten their last toys yet. After all, their Uncle Jim was still buying toys. The email box was always full of updates on the toy soldiers, spaceships and ray guns he was following on the online shopping site. Not that long ago, the postman had delivered a Star Wars light saber. Under the Christmas tree was Jim’s toy train set, the tracks resting on white felt that looked like snow and flanked by handmade glitter houses with names like “Santa’s cottage” and “Santa’s guest house.”

By the third year they hated leaving the island so much they decided to try to make the move happen before the end of the following winter. Realtors and movers were consulted, and moving estimates were gathered based on loading the truck on February 19.

Thus, the holiday season was a season of “lasts.” The last Thanksgiving in the house where Jim had grown up. The last season that Jim would visit two local parishes as St. Nicholas. The last time at each of the annual holiday parties. Kathy and Jim weren’t sad about the lasts. They were grateful for all the memories and for the friendships and family ties that would be strong enough to survive the move. It would be easy to stay in touch, and there would be visits. Retiring on an island in a warmer climate had been their mutual dream since they’d met 28 years prior, and they were looking forward to new memories. Kathy just knew that the old song she learned in Girl Scouts long ago would come true, they would “make new friends and keep the old.” In fact, in three winters on the island they had already made new friends and a few old friends had come on vacation.

Looking out the window, wondering when the first callers would arrive, Kathy imagined the sleigh under the lamppost as it had been every Christmas season until this one. The first year they were married, Jim had come home from work one day and said, “Keith got a one-horse open sleigh at an estate sale that he will let me buy!” A little research had shown it was constructed locally, probably in the 1890’s. The original painted scrollwork had never been painted over. For a quarter of a century, it had spent just a few days each year on the front lawn, with a red-bowed wreath on front and boxes wrapped as presents piled high. The nieces could document 15 years of holiday visits through pictures of themselves in or next to the sleigh, sometimes with a snowman they and Uncle Jim had built standing nearby. This year’s picture was not in the front yard, but in a historic village 90 minutes to the north. Kathy and Jim had donated the sleigh prior to their move. It made more sense to leave it in the snowy north where it had been built and used than it would to move it to a subtropical island whose palm trees only saw an inch of snow every 30 years or so.

The day after seeing the sleigh, Kathy’s sister, brother-in-law and nieces had loaded their luggage into their rental car, hugged goodbye, and everyone had said, “See you on the island!” Kathy and Jim had gone back inside and talked about their plans for the evening, New Year’s Eve. They would get together with friends early and be home well before midnight. Another round of “lasts.”

Now, remembering those cheerful goodbyes when they were full of anticipation that next time they’d be together would be down south, Kathy heard her phone chirp. It was a text from her sister, letting her know what time their plane would be landing the next day. They were coming back north after all. Their holiday visit had turned out not to be their last, but their next-to-last. Of all the phone calls Kathy had made that New Year’s morning, the one to her sister had been the hardest. The nieces would have to be told that they wouldn’t be seeing their magical, toymaking uncle on the island later this year, or any year. They would only see him again in heaven. As her own eyes filled with tears, she dreaded seeing the tears in theirs. She prayed it wouldn’t be too long before the youthful gleam and happy smiles returned.

You can never know when you get your last toy, and you can never know when you say “goodnight” or “goodbye” if there will be another “good morning” or “hello.” When you realize there won’t be, it’s hard to believe. Nearly impossible. And other times, you find yourself wondering if the 28 years before the last “goodnight” ever really happened. Or were they just a dream? And the plans you made, were they just a dream, too?