“He is no King,” she says, looking at me, and in her eyes I see long years of looking at gray slabs of stone, of peering through air thick with dust. “He is a petty thing with pretensions, and I regret to admit that he is one of mine.” She sits down beside me on the couch, and it is this unassuming, perfectly normal gesture as much as anything that makes me believe her. “I am the goddess of grief,” she says matter-of-factly, and I don’t hear the grandiosity, the capitalization-of-words, that I heard when the man said something similar. “He is the little god of guilt and bargains. A natural part of grief, for many, and therefore necessary to my employment … but his spirit is meaner than those of most of my helpers. When he realized you could see us, that he could interact with you directly…” She shrugs. “He chose to violate all protocols and do so. I apologize for his behavior.”
I nod. Tentative, hopeful, I say, “What he said, about bringing Emily back, about bargains, can you…” But I trail off, because her eyes are sad now, full of twilight. I slump. I put my face in my hands but don’t cry.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I believe her, but it doesn’t help.
“If there are gods, then is there something more, a place we go when we die, will I ever see her again?”
“I am concerned with the living,” she says simply. “Grief is my work, from beginning to end. The causes of grief, the resolutions … I cannot speak to those things.”
I am not angry, only empty. I wonder if I am not angry because she does not wish me to be angry, if she controls me that much.
“It is … unusual, your situation,” she says. “Not unheard-of, but rare. A loss such as yours can sometimes trigger deeper understanding, deeper vision. Needless to say, this changes everything. The process is made more complicated. By seeing us, knowing we’re here, you interfere with our work.”
“I think I can be devastated without your help,” I say, but without as much bite as I would wish.
“Oh, yes.” She nods, her hands folded neatly in her white lap. “Without a doubt. You can be destroyed by your loss, emptied out and drained. But without our help … it is unlikely that you will come out whole on the other side.”
“It’s supposed to get easier with time,” I say.
She smiles, perhaps, but the light touches her slantwise, so I can’t be sure. “Yes. I make it so.”
“I don’t care. Without Emily, nothing matters.” And then, bitterly: “And it is my fault that she died.”
“I can help,” she says, and I hear the pattering of moths again, white moths against the windows. “The process is broken, but … I can make you forget. Carry away your memories, carry away your pain. This house and everything in it”—she makes a sweeping gesture—”is an engine of grief. But that engine cannot run smoothly, now; your perception ruins that. Let me soothe you. Let me make it easy. Let me take it all away.”
The moths are inside now, flying around her head, and I remember reading once about a sort of moth that drinks tears to survive, clustering around weeping eyes to drink. I wonder if these are that sort of moth, and think: of course they are. They can drink my pain away, and leave cool white flutterings where the hurt used to be. That’s her offer, her gift.
Anger penetrates my grayness. “No,” I say. “No, no, no. No forgetfulness. I loved her. I won’t give that up.”
She brings her hands together, as if in prayer, and kisses her fingertips. The moths swarm together for a moment, then disappear like candle flames going out. “Then another way,” she says, and puts her gentle hand on my knee. “We’ll find another way.”
I do cry, then.
* * *
She stays with me. She holds me while I shiver on my too-empty bed. She makes me drink water, but she won’t let me take pills; instead, she sings to me when sleep won’t come, and though I suspect the songs are funeral dirges from some lost civilization, they serve as lullabies. She says that everything will be all right, and from her, how can I doubt it? And yet, of course, I do. I doubt it.
She washes my sheets, clearing away the dust, taking away the scent of Emily that clings to the fabric. She opens the drapes to let light in. I talk about loss, my loss, and she listens somberly. She watches while I rage, when I punch my fist against the wall until my knuckles are bloody, and in the presence of her patient eyes I calm down, I sit. I am not angry at the house. She says little, but somehow her presence helps me. The grayness of the days just after Emily’s death is gone; I am plunged headlong into the furnace, into the boiling pool, into the whirlwind of my life without her.
After the first two weeks, the goddess doesn’t stay every day. She leaves me to sort through pictures, clothes, musical instruments, books—these are Emily’s earthly remains, as much as the body I saw buried, and I divide them, some to go to her family, some to be given away, some to be kept deep in a closet. I feel as if I’m burying her all over again.
The goddess comes every few days, and though I tell her that I feel so broken and torn-apart at times that I fear I’ll never be whole, she never offers me the solace of her tear-drinking moths again. I hate her for that, but I am also grateful. She is the queen of grief, and she wants me to pass through the dark and the tunnels and the shadows of her kingdom, and emerge into the light on the other side.
I ask her if she was ever human, if her helpmeets ever were, if Emily might, perhaps, have her wish fulfilled—become a goddess of ice water on hot days, goddess of warm oil on sore muscles, goddess of breath in a sad lover’s lungs. The queen wraps her arms around me, and the smell of dust that surrounds her is almost sweet. “What I am, I have always been,” the queen says. “And as for others, who knows? If it pleases you to imagine your wife in such a way, do.”
Like all her comfort, it is somewhat cold and all too truthful, but I accept her words as best I can.
She leaves that night, after brewing me a cup of black tea and kissing my forehead. My grieving is not done, she says, but the time for her direct intervention is past. From now on, the process will proceed on its own. From now on, it’s up to me.
* * *
My first moment of happiness comes three months after Emily’s death. I sit on a bench in a little park near the sea cliffs, watching the sailboats in the bay. Sailboats have no particular association for me—I never went sailing with Emily, she never particularly exclaimed over the grace of wind-driven boats. Watching the colorful sails in the water, I find myself smiling, a true smile that won’t turn to poison in a moment, that isn’t a smile over something Emily said or did. This is a smile of the rest of my life.
I see a woman on the sea cliffs, and at first I think it is the queen of grief because she has the same sort of presence, the same sort of bigness, but this woman is dressed in yellow, not white. Her dress seems to be composed entirely of gauzy scarves. She dances lightly along the precipice, and when her face turns toward me for an instant it is a morning star, a sunrise after a long night, a sudden downpour of water in the desert. I recognize her in the deepest chambers of my heart—this is the goddess of joy. And behind her come other women and men, dancing in colorful costumes, feathers and shawls and hats and capes—the retinue of joy, her small gods. The goddess of joy leaps into the air over the water and shatters into light, becomes motes of brightness drifting, becomes the reflection of sunlight on the waves. The small gods follow, jumping after her, whooping and singing and laughing, and I find myself still smiling as they, too, turn to light.
The last of the small gods hesitates on the cliff. She wears a purple dress sewn all over with stars and moons. She turns her head toward me, her hair a cloud of soft black corkscrews, hiding her face. My breath stops. I look at her, wondering—do I know that shape, that hair, that stance?