Page 14

The drive down the mountain passes in a blur of white and gray. My hands have gone numb in my lap in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.

The church is already full by the time we walk in. The sanctuary smells faintly of candles and evergreen. Somebody has tucked pine branches among the white flowers surrounding the altar. The scent catches me off guard, pulling me straight back to Christmas Eve, to the cabin, to Raven curled against my chest saying her final goodbye.

I stop walking before I mean to.

Jon’s hand settles briefly against my shoulder, steady, wordless. I don’t look at him. I can’t, because my eyes have already landed on the photographs arranged beside the altar, and once they have, I can’t look away.

Somebody spent hours putting them together. Years of Raven’s life spread across easels, tables, and display boards, laid out like a life that had all the time in the world to fill them.

Raven missing her front teeth.

Raven holding a fish almost as big as she was.

Raven at graduation.

Raven on the back of my bike.

Raven on our wedding day. That’s the one that destroys me. Not because of how beautiful she looked. It’s because she’s caught mid-laugh, the kind you can’t fake for a photo. She’d spent half the afternoon trying to get one decent selfie of the two of us, and every single time we looked at each other, we broke down laughing instead. She laughed so hard that day she nearly cried, and I remember standing there thinking that if I got to spend the rest of our lives making her laugh exactly like that, I’d die a happy man.

The memory lingers a moment too long. Reality follows right behind it. The rest of our lives turned out to be a lot shorter than either of us ever let ourselves imagine.

I force my legs to keep moving.

The casket waits at the front of the church, surrounded by more flowers than I can process all at once. For a second, I can't reconcile the two things in front of me. The woman in the photos is so alive and vibrant, and my wife is lying in a box beside them.

My brain refuses to put them together. Refuses to believe they're the same person.

Before anyone can stop me, I cross the last few steps alone.

She looks like she's sleeping.

I reach for her hand, my thumb brushing over the rings still resting on her finger. My own wedding band catches against my skin as I work it loose. It resists for a second, like even the metal knows what I’m about to do.

"I promised forever," I whisper.

My voice breaks on the last words as I slide my ring onto her thumb.

For one impossible heartbeat, I almost expect her fingers to curl around mine.

They don't.

I close her hand gently around the rings and stand there a while longer, trying to memorize the last time I’ll ever hold my wife’s hand.

Samuel

Jon and I take our seat next to Knox in the front pew, the wood cold and unfamiliar beneath me. The last time I sat in a church was at my parents’ funeral, seventeen years old and too numb to understand what I was losing. I remember the same stained glass throwing colored light across the same worn carpet, the same hollow feeling of everyone around me knowing exactly what to say and none of it landing anywhere close to where it needed to.

The pastor steps up to the podium and starts talking. I watch his mouth move, catch fragments of words, comfort and peace and a life well lived, but none of it reaches me. I tune him out the same way I tuned out the other pastor all those years ago, back when a drunk driver crossed a center line and took both my parents from me in the same instant. Back when I decided whatever God was supposed to be up there watching over any of us clearly wasn’t paying attention.

I stopped believing that day. There was no version of a kind, loving God that let a drunk man walk away with barely a scratch while my parents didn’t get to walk away at all. No fucking way. That’s when I decided He wasn’t for me, and nothing since has given me a reason to change my mind.

If anything, today’s just proof I was right.

Raven planned this whole service herself, not long after her diagnosis. She sat down one afternoon while I was at the garage and wrote out exactly what she wanted, exactly how she wanted to be remembered, and then handed it to her father instead of me. I didn’t ask her why at the time. I think some part of me already knew. I refused to believe we’d ever actually end up here, and she understood that better than I did. She understood her father would be the one strong enough to carry her wishes out when the day finally came.

She was right not to trust me with it. I don’t think I could’ve read a single word of it without falling apart.

The pew creaks as Jon rises and makes his way toward the altar. He’s carrying his old guitar, the same one that’s sat propped in the corner of his living room for as long as I’ve known him, strings a little worn from years of use. He settles onto a wooden stool the church has set up for him, and the pastor steps forward to help adjust the microphone before backing away and leaving him alone up there.