Thirty-One Letters

One

Grief is the price we pay for love—Queen Elizabeth II

June 26, 2011

"I'm Adam. My best friend Patty died six months ago from cancer."

"My name is Jack. Katherine, my wife, passed last January. She was sixty-seven."

"Clara and I lost my husband fourteen months ago in a car accident."

They called it the Good Mourning Group.

The group met every Sunday, seven a.m. sharp, in the basement of the Wrightsville Beach Baptist Church. There were seven participants in attendance, each carrying their own story of how they'd ended up there in that dank little room. That wasn't including Phil Moulson, the gangly forty-three-year-old with a moustache so large it could give Colonel Mustard a run for his money, who led the group. They sat in a small circle of blue plastic chairs towards the centre of the room, all of them occupied except one. That was an oddity in and of itself. Normally, every chair was filled.

Hadley Brown sat in one of the filled chairs, listening with disinterest as Phil went around the group. Her eyes were trained on the solitary blue chair next to Phil who, as the man in charge, was taking the responsibility of asking each of the patrons to recap how it was that they'd ended up in the basement that smelled of grief and depression.

These two particular emotions, Hadley had come to note, had their own particular scent. Damp and cold, telling of a life confined with dinner for one and more than a few glasses of wine to go with it, enough that you could no longer remember why you were grieving in the first place. It smelt of barely-washed hair and a picked-over breakfast and that book that you'd started once upon a time but were likely never going to finish now.

That was what grief and depression smelled like.

She picked at her nails, listening as Clara recounted the story of her husband's death before the conversation turned to Tommy who lamented about his cousin and finally—

"Hadley?"

She tore her gaze away from the empty chair in order to meet Phil's eyes. They were beady little things, so brown that they were almost black, behind wiry glasses. He had a thin crop of blond hair that was thinning rapidly. He gazed at her expectantly, waiting for her to start.

Hadley rolled her eyes, took a breath, and got ready to endure the torture. "I'm Hadley. My broth—"

She was cut off as the door to the basement opened, flooding the room with a breath of fresh, un-grieving air, before it slammed shut again. The entire group turned to watch as a tall gangly figure walked in, face hidden beneath a dark hooded sweater, and hands stuffed into their pockets.

"Ah," Phil said as the person drew nearer. "You must be Dion. Please, take a seat."

Dion walked over to the last empty blue chair, the one that was unfortunately next to Phil, and collapsed into it. He threw his hood back, revealing dark brown skin and a buzz of brown hair. He looked tired as if he hadn't been sleeping much, lines of exhaustion lingering below his eyes.

It was only then that Hadley saw how young he was. Dion was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, around three or four years younger than she was, but he had the same haggard look on his face that she'd seen on her own face more than once. An expression that screamed that he was too young for the harshness of the world.

There was one upside to Dion's grief, Hadley realized, and that was the fact that Phil seemed to have forgotten all about her. He focused his attention on the group's newest member as he plastered a smile on his face that seemingly said 'yes, you can talk to me. I'm a trained professional.'