Title: The Deepest Sympathy
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Warnings: subject of grief, loss of a loved one (but not major character death)
Summary: Some tragedies leave wounds that never heal.
A/N: This is meant to be painful. Please heed the warnings if you are sensitive to the subject of death.

When you hear about it in passing conversation (the tragedy, they say, and how terrible it is), it makes you angry—sick to your stomach and angry. They don’t understand anything, not how truly, deeply awful it all is, so they talk about it amongst themselves, the way they find the matter sensational hidden beneath their sympathy-laden words. And you just want to scream.

But you can’t. Silence is the only defense you have left.

It keeps you safe on the outside but not within. The memories come back, sharp, fresh and painful, and the hole inside that you hoped might have gotten a little smaller with time is exactly the same size and shape it has always been.

You keep on walking, turn left down a corridor, but the voices of the nurses are able to follow you somehow.

Then you hear an echo of a laugh (hers) from nowhere, clear as if you’d heard it only yesterday when it’s been years, and the unexpectedness of the sound makes you miss a step. Someone reaches out to steady you, probably alarmed at your unusual clumsy stride, but you brush off the hand. You wish there was a place for you to be alone, to sit down, to think (why had she laughed, why? you’re afraid you don’t remember), most of all to contain the grief—

No, you remind yourself. No grieving allowed. Not under any watchful eyes ever again.

“Hey, are you all ri—?”

“Yes,” you interrupt the concern, brusque, straightening your spine. Professionalism is a mask you can fall back on, and for that you’re grateful.

You look your companion in the eyes, dead on, and repeat with more confidence, “Yes, I am.” So what if it is a lie? It’s a lie you have chosen to live. It’s the lie that keeps you going.

And no one but you will know that.

There is a simple truth about sudden loss: it shatters everything.

You live the first few days in shock. Maybe you can talk. Maybe you seem like you can function, if at least by stringing together coherent sentences to answer the endless questions. But for the most part, you feel kind of numb and people help you get through the seconds, the minutes, the hours by aiding you in the arranging of affairs. You are grateful and somewhat indifferent to their kindness. They understand. They say you are devastated. If you had the presence of mind, you would say you were drowning. Endlessly drowning.

There are a lot of touches, too many really, especially when you don’t want them, and tears and the same variations of “sorry for your loss” and “I just can’t believe it.” Most of what people say you forget as soon as you hear it, and it’s easier to breathe when there is silence. The woman curled in next to you is clinging to your hand like it’s her lifeline. You know it is, in fact, because like you, she feels like she wants to die too.

The day of the viewing is worse than you imagined. Your friend and your uncle help put you in a suit and clean you up; it’s neat and pressed and something you will never, ever wear again. You almost throw up on yourself when you walk in the small oblong room, and there she is in the coffin. It’s not her but it is, the wax-like face and stiff hair. People always said she looked like you, and even in death she still does.

The room is too hot, too full of people and the sickly sweet smell from the various flower arrangements. You’re sweating, and you know your eyes leak tears every time somebody puts a hand on your shoulder or leans in to hug you. Your wife is suffering as deeply, except that she won’t come away from the coffin or the girl-child in it where you can hardly bear to turn your gaze. You don’t hear an occasional burst of tears from her like before, the day she was told, and her silence to your ears is louder than all the people crowding into the room.

The funeral and the burial don’t go any better. Somebody puts a spoon in your hand that morning, says it’s been too long, that you need your strength, and forces you to eat. You dress yourself carefully. You even shave, not really recognizing the face in the mirror. But at some point your grief has literally made you sick, and you’re running a low-grade fever which you don’t have the energy or heart to care about. During the ceremony, the words of the preacher, the Lord’s prayer, are garbled noises in your ears. The air here has the same nauseating smell as at the funeral home. At the very front of the church, the coffin is closed. You’re holding hands with the people on either side of you. Your fingers are cold, though there’s a fire licking its way around the collar of your dress shirt. Once and a while everything in sight slides left in one big blur.

You might wonder vaguely during the ride to the cemetery if, when they lower the coffin, you can crawl into the ground with it where the earth will be blessedly cold and silent. It’s not until they actually start to do that very thing that you realize she’s being taken away from you for good, and at best you both (who were so close) will always be separated by several feet of dirt. You make a horrible noise, a sound more wounded than anything you have ever made in your life, including that time you broke your arm as a young boy. It sets off some kind of chain reaction at the graveside. Next to you, your child’s mother breaks into a keen and then a harsh, gut-deep sobbing no amount of comfort can ease. Somebody’s arm stays tight across your shoulders when you bend down to find the air you’ve lost. Eventually, eventually, supporting what family you have left, or being supported, you leave it all behind. You think somebody feeds you, or tries, and a close friend and doctor helps you sedate your wife, then yourself so you both can manage a little sleep. Sleeping, however, makes you no less weary or heartsick.

Nothing about the past week will be remembered too clearly, and it won’t matter. The feeling that struck you when they first gave you the news (she didn’t make it, she didn’t make it oh god) is the one thing that stays. Some days it seems more bearable than others, when it’s just a deep ache like you got punched in the ribs. If you’re sleeping and you can’t feel it, your dreams become a substitute for the pain because she’s in them. Sometimes she tells you she’s not dead, and sometimes you’re chasing after her like you used to do when you played ‘catch me if you can, daddy!’

You’re not sure, of course, since you don’t remember much because of the shock and horror and overwhelming grief but you think maybe the after is worse. When it’s just the two of you alone in the apartment—you and what’s left behind of hers. One morning you almost break your neck tripping over something in the hallway. You look down, and it is a small toy. You don’t know why it’s there, and you feel sick and cold as you reach down to pick it up. So you leave it, and pretend you never saw it.

Later, after the longest you can manage to stay away from the apartment without finding somewhere to get into trouble, you come home and the toy is on the coffee table next to a mug of your wife’s favorite tea and her prescription bottle. She comes out of the kitchen, looking wan and so much frailer than she did a month ago. You can’t say anything to her because the tightness in your throat makes it impossible. She doesn’t say anything to you because the anti-depressants make her absentminded. In your head, though, you know she wouldn’t speak to you if she could. What was there to say? Our child is dead. How are you doing today?

You try once or twice to numb the way you feel with alcohol but ironically it has the effect of making you forget. You’re afraid you could lose so much of your mind that you would lose the memories of her too, and those are all you have left.

Finally coming off of bereavement leave and returning to work, you have some hope things should be better.

They aren’t.

It’s in the way people talk to you, gently, or stare at your back that is the unrelenting reminder of what happened. It is gut-punching every time you meet a new person, somebody who wants to get off on the right foot with you and asks if you’re married, how many children do you have, the usual questions that you can’t answer so simply anymore. Your voice always cracks, or your expression, and then the subject can’t be shoved aside or forgotten, even in the face of your still-too-new grief. So going back to work is no haven, if just for that reason.

But there’s another reason you didn’t anticipate, and that is the job itself.

People die, and you have to be professional about it. You have been professional about it in the past. But you can’t, you really can’t handle it now, you find out, because death and loss are such raw, personal concepts. You have to admit this inability to your direct supervisor, much to your shame. With pity in his eyes, he helps you out by giving you the kind of boring lab work most others hate to do. In your records, it states the change is only temporary. In your heart, you fear it might not be.

Time passes, just like everyone promised. Your days take on a monotonous, almost empty routine that you feel you can manage. You work long shifts at the hospital because the work occupies your thoughts without any subsequent pain. Once and a while, you fall asleep there. At home it’s always quiet. All the rooms are quiet. Sometimes no one is there when you are, and you don’t once think ill of your wife for her absence. If she’s there while you are and you’re both in bed, you might talk a little, ask mundane questions that mean nothing, desiring no real information in return. You and she don’t touch unless you have to. You both know, as rational, well-educated people, it is not good that you can’t reconnect. You went with her to a grief counseling session one time as an attempt to find that lost ground. But the counselor asked you questions, and your throat did that closing up it likes to do nowadays, and you said nothing. At the end of it, your wife just looked sadder than before.

It surprises friends and family, you think, when the separation happens. They worry about it, and try to console you and convince you it won’t last, but you’re trained to recognize when an illness is too far-gone. So the day she brings the divorce papers over to your little one-bedroom place, you sign them without much comment. As she starts to leave though, you say, without meaning to, “It’s not your fault” because you know you’re the one who has been too listless to fight for their relationship.

But then she replies, “It’s not yours either,” and for a moment you think you might cry.

That is the last time you see her in person for many years. You submit your resignation at your job, pack up one duffel bag, and leave the good state of Georgia. People ask where you’re headed, and you say you don’t know, although you have some idea.

You need time to put yourself back together. You need a distraction and a slow way to ease back into the life you used to have before everything shattered. You know you can’t let your career in medicine, all the belief and investment your family had in you and your dreams, go to waste simply because it hurts like being stabbed when you see death coming. You need an order to the chaos that you’ve become. Most of all, you need your loss to be your own personal, private pain and yours alone.

Starfleet promises you all of that, if indirectly. That’s how you end up in Iowa on a shuttle, clutching a flask as though you’re a regular old drunk and arguing with a female officer who looks like she has no sense of humor. You sit down next to a guy, having been forced out of the bathroom (your aviophobia is real), and try out your new gruff persona, growling at him loudly you had nowhere else to go because your wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. You don’t say you gave it to her out of guilt and shame, and because you prayed she was less broken than you were and could make something of the rest of her life. You don’t mention a little girl’s name, the same name as your late paternal grandmother Joanna.

The guy looks at you like he understands. There’s a misery in his eyes you’ve seen in the mirror every morning for close to a year. You wonder if his burden is as bad as yours, but you don’t ask because you know of all the things you could do, that’s the worst one. Pain has to be respected. A wound has to be given time and space to heal. And when neither time nor space is enough, because the wound is too severe, it has to be accepted for what it is.

Leonard understands he isn’t going to come all the way back from losing his daughter. The best he can do, he figures, is pretend that he did and keep on living. No one will have to know otherwise, perhaps until he feels ready to tell them.

-Fini

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