Joan

"The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. ... The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular."*

You always experience death the same way. The sweat in your armpits despite the initial cold rush when the blood freezes in your veins. The heat as the emotions rise to your face and boil over. 

A minute ago, you were fine. You didn't know. Ignorance was bliss. Now everything is different. Your life has been shuffled around, broken into before and after.

After you calm down, you get to work. You always research. You look for news articles and police reports so you can piece together the story for yourself. It isn't that you don't believe the story you were told, more that you need to see it with your own eyes.

You try to visualize it: the accident, the last moments, the aftermath. You don't know why. It doesn't seem to help, just gives you something to dwell on other than your emotions. But you do it every time.

Randomly, in the grocery store, mowing the lawn, in the middle of the night, you imagine what the victim thought in their last moments. No one will ever know, but you will always wonder.

214 words

*from Obit by Victoria Chang