Alchemy and Algebra

Chapter 26

Kennedy started her return drive early the next morning. She'd slept hard and heavy and woke up feeling better than she had in days. That didn't stop her from drifting into what-ifs and should-have-beens once the last hour of her audiobook was finished. As frustrating as the story had been, it still kept her thoughts occupied as she drove among the light traffic between towns.

She tried to think of the class she was supposed to be in right now. She'd known she wouldn't make it back for her first class of the day, but was hoping to sneak home to decompress for a half hour before her next class.

Even thinking of (branch of statistics) couldn't stop thoughts of Charlie from swirling through her mind. She wondered if she could talk him out of his appalling business practices and go back to the way things had been once before. It was an appealing fantasy, but she knew it wouldn't work. He'd broken her trust, revealed that his moral compass was set to a magnetic North far distant from Kennedy's own. Even if he stopped using the death of other people's loved ones for personal gain, he would always be the kind of person who made such awful, heartless choices. She didn't want to be constantly looking over her shoulder, waiting for what terrible thing he would do next.

Her limbs heavy with the grief she was finally allowing herself to feel, Kennedy parked her car and trudged up to her apartment. She pushed open the door, imagining how good it would feel to stretch out on her bed with a paperback for a while and simultaneously cleanse her literary palate of the taste of her one-star audiobook and to switch off her restless mind for a while.

She nearly slipped on a shiny brochure that had been slipped under her door, presumably sometime after Chandra had left for the day. Unless she'd spent the night at her boyfriend's place? Kennedy picked up the brochure, then nearly dropped it and kicked it right back out into the hallway. "West Wind Tarot Readings" read the logo on the upper corner of the brochure. Below that it read, "Grief Workshop."

Kennedy wanted to crumple the thing into a tiny ball, then zap it in the microwave, then run it through a paper shredder, then burn the bits. Why on earth had someone - Charlie, presumably - wanted to rub her face in the program that had driven her and Charlie apart? It was callous, at best, and a cruel taunt at worst.

She couldn't say what made her pull out the slip of paper sticking out from the folds of the brochure. Wanting to know the worst all at once, perhaps. Once you're as low as you can go, more hurt is far less of a shock than when it comes on a good day.

"Kennedy,

I wanted you to know the truth about what you saw. If you still don't want to talk to me, I'll understand. Actually, I won't understand, but I'll accept your decision. I know you're angry and hurt. Please just read the brochure. I'd love to talk to you about it when you're done.

-Charlie"

With her backpack still over her shoulders and the apartment door wide open, Kennedy stood and read every word of the brochure Charlie had left for her.

The grief program wasn't supernatural. At all.

Charlie - Kennedy assumed he was the writer - wrote in gentle language about meeting with other people who were grieving. Group activities centered heavily around writing down memories of loved ones, and not just factual memories, but feelings: early days together, fights, making up, the circumstances around losing the person.

Essentially, it was an all-feelings-are-valid support group plus concrete activities to capture memories and process feelings of loss and helplessness, and no-one would be shamed for claiming to feel the presence of one who had passed, or for having dreams of the person that seemed impossibly real. There was even a caveat at the end that people who were really struggling would be referred to a mental health professional with excellent recommendations and a sliding pay scale. This was exactly the sort of program that would have helped her grandmother after her grandfather's death.