A Bitter Place

(Ed. note: this is a work of fiction… fiction! My wife is alive and well, have no worries about that.)

On the morning of the third day after, without much preparation or thought, he pushed himself out of bed, put on his boots (still damp from walking in the rain the day before) and headed down to the river.

This was the Occuquan. At the end of the water, that was what the Doegs called it, long before the first European settlements sprung up on the banks. From where he stood, just around the bend, past tiny Conrad Island, the waters merged with the Potomac to make Belmont Bay, before continuing south and feeding into the broad waters of the Chesapeake. A slow river. A life giver, dammed three times to provide water for the surrounding counties.

Truth is, he’d never thought much about the river, even though it was practically in his backyard. They’d walked next to it almost every day for years, admired the color of the water reflecting the sky above, the rich dank stink of the mud flat when the tide was low enough to expose the old wooden bones of some long forgotten wreck. Out in the middle of the channel, on a post that sported a No Wake sign, ospreys had built a nest. On occasion he had come across a fish on dry land, fallen from the sky, wriggled loose from the claws that captured it. Bald eagles, those strong and stupid scroungers of old kills, hunted up and down the shoreline. Fish broke the surface, leaving mysterious concentric waves to mark the passing. Ducks. Geese. Turkey vultures. The omniscient crows, cackling their mysterious messages to unseen ears. All this he had seen, heard, experienced, but never with anything other than surface level consideration. It was the first river he’d ever lived so close to, just a mile away from their house.

He’d made the short walk down to the steep river bank in under sixteen minutes, according to his watch, a good walk or a dry slow run. Not many people were out that morning, a few old ladies pulled along by ancient dogs, or dogs pushed in strollers by old ladies, as it happened. A warm day, a nice day. That’s what people said, in passing, if they said anything at all, as they nodded and waved. How you doing? Nice day. Have a good one. That’s how people said it. Have a nice day.

He would never again have a nice day, a great day. Not anymore. Had he ever? He’d endured days of useless worry and ruthless despair. He’d struggled and fought and failed upward with relentless inevitability, never intending to scale the heights of human experience but doing so nonetheless, somehow kicked down the road toward a reward that would forever elude. Tantalus and his eternal struggle. Happiness always just beyond his grasping hands. A useless, pointless endeavor… the end of the water.

She had passed in her sleep. There was no pain, he was told. She’s in a better place. He didn’t think that was something you should say under these circumstances but he heard it from many different people. Better place? He looked out on the river, the reflection of the blue sky coloring the constantly moving water. Oh look, how blue she used to say. She loved the broad old slow moving river. They’d seen sky spanning rainbows reflected whole in the water, forming a circle of color. Slap me some leaf, she’d say to the old willow tree, it’s branches bent low enough to brush against them as they walked beneath it. How could anywhere be better than right here? How could there possibly be a better place than this?

Today she wasn’t by his side. She was gone. Not to a better place, just… no longer there. All things born must die. Life and its amazing, dreadful consequence. Words, the lifeblood of his existence, faltered and failed. There were no more words. There was no life without her.

Step into the river now. Mark a path to the distant shore, the destination unreachable. Feel the water, life giving, life bringer, around his legs. Someone shouted from very far away, startled, alarmed. It meant nothing. The crows watched, the heron passed overhead, and far above an eagle or osprey effortlessly mastered the invisible currents of wind. The waters opened wide and swallowed him whole.

The world would go on, as it always had. Just without him.